AMD 64 3200+ OC & Ram timings...

[oahn]

Ok, I hate to ask, but reading through at least 100 posts, you all seem like you have a decent forum here for discussion and hopefully you can help me out.

System:
Asus A8N-SLI (bios rev. 1014)
AMD 64 3200+ (250x10 OC)
Thermaltake XP90 w/ 80mm fan (silent as heck)
2Gb (2x1gb) PQI3200 Turbo ram (8-3-3-2.5)
BFG 7800 GTX OC 256 DDR3
Creative Audigy FX XtremeMusic
Ultra 500w/ps & Ultra case
Hyundai L90D+ 19" monitor
Logitech X-530 5.1

Comment and Questions I have is...

I have been reading and reading about the ram settings and the best possible configuration for overclocking. It leaves me a bit confused as to what's better necessarily, lower and tighter timings or memory bandwidth or I don't know what?

I realized that the 3200+ had a locked multiplier at 10x and I have had my processor up at 270 FSB but it was unstable with the earlier bios (rev. 1004) for this board. I haven't upped it since I installed the latest bios (last night).

My settings, looking at CPU-Z my settings for the ram at 8-3-3-2.5 and (TRC)=16, DRAM Time idler=16, FSBRAM=CPU/12 with a frequency of 208.5. This also gave me the best scores according to the Nvidia Performance tool. Also, I have my HTT set to 4x in the bios for a total of 1000.

Question #1, is there anything else I should bother tweaking at this point, outside of maybe playing with the FSB and pushing it a bit higher, moving Cas down to 2, etc.?

Question #2, is it true about HD data corruption at lower settings due to the time it takes to read and right across the ram, especially at shutdown, the safer setting being cas+ras+2 for your Tras setting? If so, then 3+3+2 giving me 8 seems correct.

Question #3, the system never dumps, runs at 29 C at idle and only as high as 36 C fully taxing it after hours of BF2, HL2 or CoD2. Also put a Zalman ZM-NB47J (artic 5 thermal) on the northbridge after the dreaded fan problem occurred with no noticeable difference to temp. Should I bother messing with the voltage as I haven't had any problems running it on auto.

Thanks in advance for any advice or answers. I have read, re-read and read and said, "What that guy said just contradicted the other guy?!" so I am thoroughly confused now.

See you on the online battlefields!

~ OahnMacleod

PS - This is one reference article which makes me believe that I have the best setting for my ram currently: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx

 

[danizaken]

I have a question about this too.
If i overclock a athlon 64 from 2.2 to 2.42 by upping the htt to 220 X 11, should i run my memory in sync at 220mhz with the following timings:
2.5-3-3-6 2T or should i run it at 173mhz(using a 3:2 divider, CPU/14)
with the famous: 2-2-2-5 1T ?
At 200Mhz and further i can only use 2T because i have 4x256 sticks and the memory controller on my cpu core can't handle them at 1T.