Introduction
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A lot has been said about CPU and VGA overclocking, but it is also possible to overclock your RAM memory in order to boost your PC performance without spending a penny. Memory overclocking is done through the motherboard’s setup (you can enter the setup program by hitting the Del key during the memory counting that appears everytime you turn your PC on), almost always on the same menu as where the CPU clock appears (usually called “Frequency/Voltage Control” or similar).
The process is a little bit boring, like all overclocking procedures. You will have to change the memory clock, save the new configuration, reboot your PC, and check to ensure that your computer is still working correctly. We recommend that you run your favorite 3D game for a while in order to check if everything is running alright. We also recommend that you run a benchmarking software in order to check the performance gain from the overclocking. As we will explain later, sometimes memory overclocking decreases the PC performance, depending on the configurated timings. (We will cover this topic in this tutorial as well.) We recommend that you run two programs: Sandra, on its Memory Bandwidth Benchmark module to check the increase in memory performance; and SuperPI, to check the increase in the overall PC performance.
After rebooting the PC and testing if the overclocking was successful, you have two options. If the overclocking went right, you can go back to the motherboard’s setup and try increasing the memory clock even more and repeating the whole process, until you find the maximum overclocking capability of your memory module. If the overclocking went wrong, you should go back to the setup and lower the memory clock, since the clock you configured isn’t making the memory work right.
All overclocking procedures can work or not. It is not possible for us to tell you if it will work in your system and the maximum clock memory you will achieve on it. Overclocking is a trial-and-error process.
That’s the basic idea. There are two tricks in order to achieve a higher overclocking level: raising the memory voltage and playing with the memory timings. We will now explain in detail how the memory overclocking is done, including those two tricks.
