MSI R9 380 Heating Problem after buying RAM

Jun 12, 2018
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Hi guys,

I'm new to this site (in terms of posting something) and I hope I chose the right section for this thread. I'm also kinda mediocre about PCs, so don't be too harsh on me.

Soo, this winter one of my sticks of RAMs has crashed and I remained with only one stick of 4GB.
I had 2x4 GB dual channel Kingston HyperX 1600MHz CL9.

This month, i gathered some money and I bought another stick of 4gb Kingston HyperX Savage 4GB DDR3, 1600MHz, CL9. The only difference was on voltage, the older one having 1.5 V and the newer one having 1.65V.

So firstly, I read a little bit on internet about dual-channel with 2 different RAM and learned that it can work, the only condition is to match the frequency and latency. Anyway, in case one is weaker than the other, nothing will happen, except a bottleneck on the faster one.So I tried to put them in dual-channel and I noticed my GPU would heat up to 100 *C (which never happened when I had even the single stick of 4gb. Max temp. would have been 70-75 *C).

After that, I said, "ok, let's try single-channel, maybe something is not right when in dual-channel". So I did. Indeed, the things were normal for a while, until I noticed (more precisely, I heard the fans of the card) that the temperature was high as hell again (90-100). But it was not constant. Sometimes, I played (Fortnite) 3-4 hours without passing 75*C and sometimes after 15 minutes of playing, suddenly the temp. goes from 65-70 up to 90+.

Now... I did a memtest on the new module of RAM and on both of them, and everything was fine.
Also, I read the temperature with the Wattman built-in app from AMD software. I let it run while in-game and checked the temp. from time to time.

The interesting part is that, even though I reach high temps (90-100) my frames are barely affected and the game-play is still pretty smooth, but I know is not very healthy to keep your video card on high temps.


Photos with cpu-z (because I saw in other threads that they could be helpful):

https://imgur.com/a/HWsz3El

I really don't know what's happening. Can RAM affect the video card in such a way?

Sorry for my English if there are any mistakes and I hope you can help me. Thanks!

Specs:
MOBO: Fatal1ty B85 Killer
CPU: Intel Core i5-4590 @ 3.5 GHz
GPU: MSI R9 380
RAM: 4+4GB Ram @ 1600 MHz
OS: Windows 8.1
 
Jun 12, 2018
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Ok, so I found the problem.

First of all, I made a mistake, actually, my OLD stick of RAM is 1.65 V and the NEW ones are 1.5 V (irrelevant anyway).

I was playing around in bios to see if i actually have some settings for RAM voltage or not, because my assumption was that the only problem is related to voltage. And I found a table with different profiles and I saw that for the XMP profile, one of the sticks consumes 1.65 V and the other one 1.5 V. So I put the default profile for both of them, which means, same frequency 1600, but CL11 and the problems stopped. Since then my GPU never went over 75*C.

I thought I would post the answer here, maybe it'll help others. Thank you, anyway! :)