Stephen wrote:
On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:08:14 -0500, Paul wrote:

The modules should fit, as I don't think UDIMM versus UDIMM ECC makes
any difference to slot keying. The BIOS could choose to ignore the
ECC, and if for some reason the extra eight bits weren't wired up,
it shouldn't hurt anything.


Hello,

Just to let you know I put the ECC RAM into the new, non-ECC
motherboard and like you predicted, it works fine. It is 800 and board
supports up to 1066, so I wonder whether I would see a difference
upgrading to that speed?

Thanks,
Stephen.

AMD processors are a little more dependent on RAM speed than
some of the Intel ones. But not to the point for me at least,
that I'd be buying more RAM.

To give you some idea, my Asrock board runs DDR2-533,
and the machine I'm typing on is DDR2-800. So I didn't
exactly splash out on the RAM :-)

The problem now, is finding some worthy RAM for an upgrade.
When RAM goes out of style, the enthusiast grades are the first to go.
And one DDR2-1066 product I was just looking at, got bad
reviews, because it didn't appear to be up to spec.

As far as I can remember, something like DDR2-800 might have
been the top Jedec speed. To make higher speeds or reduce the
latency, they generally boost the RAM voltage. The Kingston
tables show the trend. Nominal DDR2 is 1.8V, with the fastest
grade tested here at 2.3 or 2.35V. If you expect the RAM to
operate at the stated speed, you have to apply that voltage.
So the RAM will be running a little warmer.

http://web.archive.org/web/200701040...s/khx_ddr2.asp

And sometimes you get a little surprise. I remember when I
got my new motherboard, I put some Kingston DDR2-800 in
it, and carefully adjusted it so that (I thought) it would
be running at DDR2-800. Later, when I was checking, I discovered
by using CPU-Z, it was running DDR2-1066 and the computer hadn't crashed.
(The speed thing, is a BIOS bug.) And that was without boosted
voltage or anything (because at the time, I wasn't interested in
overclocking the RAM). Some of the DDR2 out there has headroom,
but the best way to spot that, is to read the reviews on Newegg
and see how things are going, today. The thing is, sometimes
a really great brand of RAM chips goes out of production, and
then there's nothing left but less overclockable chips.
The customer review are the best way to spot a trend.

Overclocking RAM is a little tricky, because the BIOS may not
adjust tRAS, tCAS, tRCD, that sort of thing. You're expected to
"scale" the numbers yourself, if you adjust the BIOS so that
some hardware is overclocked. RAM overclocking can be a side
effect of changing a CPU setting, or it can be a purposeful change
in the RAM page of the BIOS (on AMD, effectively changing the
clock divider). To make an overclocking experiment meaningful,
you need to find a web article on it, to get a better handle on
how many "knobs" to turn :-) Clock, up. Voltage, up. Timing parameters,
scale up. And so on. Then, a little memtest86+, followed by perhaps
a Linux LiveCD and some Prime95 testing. If your RAM is unstable,
the last thing you want to do, is boot into Windows, because the
registry can get corrupted. Only boot to Windows, when all your
other testing shows your adjustments are perfectly stable
and error free. You can't hurt a Linux LiveCD, with RAM errors.
It's a CD (read-only).

Paul