RAM speeds and BIOS settings

I seem to have been beaten with the naive stick at some point earlier in life.

I finished my PC build this weekend and checked through the BIOS to see if anything was amiss. It all looked fine with the CPU at the correct speed and the RAM set to auto. I have a 2x1GB PC6400 C4D set installed and have managed to get it in the correct sockets too according to the motherboard manual. Vista said my RAM was rated at 5.9 so I thought everything was running according to plan...

However, Sisoft Sandra just told me my ram is running at 5 5 5 18. My mobo is the ASUS M2N32 Sli Deluxe.

I suppose the BIOS is set to defaults or some 'safe' setting but it didn't appear to be underclocked in any of the more obvious settings I saw.

Anyone have any advice? I'd deliberately not done any EPP enabling as I wanted to get everything working first but I assumed the auto setting would set the RAM to the standard settings it said on the tin when I bought it...

Auto doesn't always do that. Sometimes you have to set it manually, though EPP enabling will probably do that all for you.

Ok. I've left Sisoft Sandra doing a burn in loop till I get back from work so I'll have a fiddle later.

I checked the bios and changed various settings to see what effect it had on the RAM speeds.

SLI memory profile or similar had to be set to 'optimal' for it to run at the rated speeds of 800MHz @ 4-4-4-12-2T. Setting to 'High performance' didn't change the basic ram settings but was stable so that's what it's at currently.

There is also a setting just below that called SLI CPUOC % which the discription said adjusts the memory settings to support cpu overclock. I had increased the clock to 215 giving a 7% OC so adjusted this value to 7% also but there weren't any visible changes. On the plus side though I've got the equivalent to a 6000+ for £40 less and no half multipliers in sight :) Temps raised by around 5degC but I haven't done any comprehensive benchmarking/comparisons yet. Memory clock is 860MHz with no problems.

I did discover that sensorsview didn't work in Vista nor did cpuz. Anyone know of some vista x46 compatible temp monitoring software or should I do system overclocking in XP instead? :mrgreen: