My pursuit of high benchmark scores has led me to do many strange things to every component on my computer. Since Geekbench 3 is present the 2017 Hwbot Team Cup, the memory in my main (and only) PC finally became the target of these strange tweaks.
The system being overclocked is as follows:
-i5 4690k @4.7 GHz 1.425V VCore [Benchmark Stable]
-Hyper 212 Evo
-Asrock Z97 Pro4
-Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 Fury [Stock]
-One 8 GB stick of Crucial Ballistix Sport 800 MHz 9-9-9-24 1T 1.5V [Micron ICs]
-One 8 GB stick of Patriot Viper 3 800 MHz 10-10-10-27 2T 1.5V [Unknown ICs]
-Corsair RM750 PSU
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| My main computer is rather dusty. |
With those parts, I began my quest to overclock my memory. I began by setting my DRAM voltage to 1.65V, changing a setting to make sure the memory was trained upon boot, loosening my timings to 13-13-13-35 1T, and raising the DRAM ratio. Past 1:8, the system couldn't boot with those timings, so decided to keep the memory at 1066 MHz and lower the timings.
I ended up with 11-12-11-27 1T as my final timings. These timings netted me a
14763 Multicore score. I could beat this score now that I've learned how to trick Geekbench 3 into allowing me to run the 64 bit version, but this is good enough for now.
After I was done with Geekbench, I decided to try and see how far I could push the memory frequency. For this, I underclocked my CPU to 3 GHz, as I knew I would probably end up messing with the base clock.
Initially, I began by removing my stick of Crucial memory and overclocking my Viper 3 stick in the first slot. I set the timings to 14-14-14-40 2T and began pushing the frequency. Beyond 1100 MHz, the stick refused to POST.
I, then, replaced the Patriot stick with the Ballistix Sport RAM and began overclocking with the same timings. The Crucial memory only got to 1100 MHz. I raised the System Agent and Digital + Analog I/O voltages by +0.05 this time (The Z97 Pro4 has these voltages as offsets). The stick was then able to boot at 1200 MHz.
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| The Crucial stick booted at 1200Mhz. |
The stick was not able to POST at 1300 MHz, so I began to overclock the base frequency with a 1200 MHz memory clock. I slowly progressed through the BCLK speeds as my motherboard struggled to POST with even the slightest BCLK overclock.
I eventually got my computer to post at 103 BCLK which got the DRAM frequency to
1235 MHz.
I'm sorry about the lack of images of me doing this and the vagueness. I didn't really document what I did all that well, so I'm having to go off my memory. In the future, I'm going to try to document the process better.
