Is this safe?

A stock I7 will see no gain in performance forcing the ram to run at 1600mhz. But it will not hurt anything in doing so but some systems will become unstable with the memory set that high.

If the ram was soled at that speed on the site or in the store you should change the settings in bios to make them go that fast and with that voltage and they will function normally.
It could be the bios version or some motherboards need to manually adjust the settings.

If you want to overclock them i would say to do as you think, or stop at 1333 MHz.

Have fun with your new system .

You have an impressive configuration for doing overclocking. If you have a good heatsink, you should think about doing it. That cpu usually reach 4Ghz easily. It's a shame to have that micro running at 2,8Ghz.

Thanks man. I don't have a good heatsink yet. I have the stock one. I plan on buying one soon, though. I'm just afraid I'm going to ruin the processor or the life of it by overclocking. I imagine I will at some point, but that will be after I fully understand what it is that needs to be changed and why that's so. So if I change the memory to 1600, I don't have to touch anything (voltages)?

It's safe, but if you want win performance you need OC the processor, the RAM and the GPU at the same time.

the answer is yes you can do that, but as others have said there is very little gain in doing that...

You cannot just set the speed to 1600 - you have to set a couple of clocks and multipliers to reach 1600

1600 ram is just higher quality 1066 ram that can be overclocked safely to 1600 speeds. That process will end up increasing the voltage from the standard 1.5 volts to the maximum of 1.65 volts. Any voltage higher than 1.65 volts can permanently damage your i7-930 CPU.

Why bother? You will get improved application performance, or an increase in FPS of perhaps 1-3%. Is that worth it to you? Not to me.

Overclocking your i7-930 should be very simple if you do not get greedy. Just raise the BCLK value from 133 to something like 150 or 160 in small steps and your cpu will be running at the speeds of a 975. I consider this a safe value. Leave the ram values to auto. Increasing the BCLK will automatically overclock the ram a bit, but you will probably still stay at 1.5 volts. Use cpu-z to verify all this.

Thanks for your guys' input. Ya I agree that the gains aren't necessary. BUT, that wouldn't be why I'm doing it. I've started thinking of my computing situation as a hobby. So it's more interesting than performance reasons. Well, I've ordered a new heatsink, gonna reevaluate the wiring and cooling and I'll look to do some OCing after I understand how to do it fully without harming anything.