Ok, I'm running my Q6600 G0 rev. on a 680i A1 at 3.2Ghz. I have a few questions/concerns. I originally had Corsair XMS2 800mhz sticks but my builder upsold me on 1066 Dominator sticks since I planned on OC'ing. One thing that I don't like is Vista shows my memory score as 5.1 while I have 5.9's on everything else. "Performance memory" shouldn't be holding back my system!
I have the Micron version sticks which are supposed to overclock better and are rated at 1066mhz at 5-5-5-15 at 2.2v. I have never once been able to have anything over 800mhz be stable, even with extremely loose timings. I don't know if its the memory or the 680i's memory controller thats bad? I eventually just downclocked the memory back to 800mhz and tightened the timings to 4-4-4-10. In Everest's memory test I get the following scores:
Read-8183
Write-7037
Copy-6099
Latency-77.5
Is this within normal range? I still can't figure out why Vista is showing performance RAM as 5.1 when others that use this RAM get 5.9 on a slower processor! Also since swapping my XMS2 for Dominator sticks my system seems slower. It used to take like 12 seconds to unrar a 700mb movie which now takes 20-30 seconds! I was so impressed with the original memory and how fast it zipped through that rar file! This was even running at 2.7 as opposed to 3.2Ghz.
The last few weeks I've been having "driver stopped responding" referring to my EVGA 8800GTX while playing games or even expanding a window on the desktop. Movies would also lock up consistently. I tried every GPU driver out there and even reformatted and went back to XP Pro with the same lockups. I also set everything back to stock settings to be sure it wasnt any OC issues. I finally tried removed a stick of RAM leaving me with only 1GB, but it solved the problem and I was actually able to play CoD4 for more than 4 seconds!
I requested a new set of sticks from my vendor so I'm really anxious to see if the new sticks are able to run at 1066 or raise my Vista score. If not then I assume it's a bad motherboard? I also just upgraded to Vista Ultimate x64 so I'm looking forward to adding another 6gigs to settle at 8GB total. Being that 2GBs of PC8500 can be had for $50 AR I don't see any reason not to. Are the Dominator sticks just bad?
I tried using memtest but it didn't seem to be working right. The test would end really quick and I had thousands of errors! The errors always stayed the same no matter if I added/removed a stick so I assumed something wasn't right. I tried MS's mem test and it passed that. It did fail Everests memtest though. As soon as I clicked memory and cache I would get a hardware failure.
So my questions are: Why does there seem to be issues with running at 1066 on a 680i? Is it the memory itself or the memory controller/motherboard? Anyone using a similar setup that can tell me if those Everest scores fall within normal range? And why does Vista show my memory score being so low? There seems to be a few people having these same issues. Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.
I have the Micron version sticks which are supposed to overclock better and are rated at 1066mhz at 5-5-5-15 at 2.2v. I have never once been able to have anything over 800mhz be stable, even with extremely loose timings. I don't know if its the memory or the 680i's memory controller thats bad? I eventually just downclocked the memory back to 800mhz and tightened the timings to 4-4-4-10. In Everest's memory test I get the following scores:
Read-8183
Write-7037
Copy-6099
Latency-77.5
Is this within normal range? I still can't figure out why Vista is showing performance RAM as 5.1 when others that use this RAM get 5.9 on a slower processor! Also since swapping my XMS2 for Dominator sticks my system seems slower. It used to take like 12 seconds to unrar a 700mb movie which now takes 20-30 seconds! I was so impressed with the original memory and how fast it zipped through that rar file! This was even running at 2.7 as opposed to 3.2Ghz.
The last few weeks I've been having "driver stopped responding" referring to my EVGA 8800GTX while playing games or even expanding a window on the desktop. Movies would also lock up consistently. I tried every GPU driver out there and even reformatted and went back to XP Pro with the same lockups. I also set everything back to stock settings to be sure it wasnt any OC issues. I finally tried removed a stick of RAM leaving me with only 1GB, but it solved the problem and I was actually able to play CoD4 for more than 4 seconds!
I requested a new set of sticks from my vendor so I'm really anxious to see if the new sticks are able to run at 1066 or raise my Vista score. If not then I assume it's a bad motherboard? I also just upgraded to Vista Ultimate x64 so I'm looking forward to adding another 6gigs to settle at 8GB total. Being that 2GBs of PC8500 can be had for $50 AR I don't see any reason not to. Are the Dominator sticks just bad?
I tried using memtest but it didn't seem to be working right. The test would end really quick and I had thousands of errors! The errors always stayed the same no matter if I added/removed a stick so I assumed something wasn't right. I tried MS's mem test and it passed that. It did fail Everests memtest though. As soon as I clicked memory and cache I would get a hardware failure.
So my questions are: Why does there seem to be issues with running at 1066 on a 680i? Is it the memory itself or the memory controller/motherboard? Anyone using a similar setup that can tell me if those Everest scores fall within normal range? And why does Vista show my memory score being so low? There seems to be a few people having these same issues. Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.