Question and checklist before increasing RAM MHz

Hello everyone. I read and tried to understand as much as I can about setting ram timings and increasing speed. I am very new at this and I apologize for noob questions. I'll try to provide as much info about my system. If you guys need to know more let me know.

RAM: corsair xms3 DDR3-1600 [current speed is 1066 with 7-7-7-20]
Model: CM3X2G1600C9DHX
MB: XFX 790i Ultra
Goal: set ram speed to 1600 MHz

Question: Do I need to OC my CPU [E8500 @ 3.16 stock speed] to increase my ram speed? As much as possible I do not want to do this until I have read more guides on how to do it properly.

Checklist:
According to this website :http://www.autdirect.co.uk/product/mem1600xms/ I should use these settings at the BIOS:

- Set Timings to 9-9-9-24
- Set RAM volt to 1.8v
- I know I'm suppose to set the FSB ratio/ DRAM to 1:2 = 400 MHz : 1,600 MHz [where do I do this?]
- run memtest86+ and check for stability

If I follow those settings, am I guaranteed to see 1600 MHz RAM speed? Any additional advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

It would help to know what motherboard you have. We don't even know the maximum supported RAM speed for your board.

A recent article compared different RAM speeds and showed that even if you got 1600MHz you'd likely see a MAXIMUM benefit of about 2% and usually nothing. This is because other factors are the weakest link. The article also showed that lower timings were more important than higher RAM speed (within a certain range, obviously 400MHz versus 2000MHz is a big difference; 1066MHz versus 2000MHz made little difference in most situations). In retrospect even this 2% was more for the Core i7 920 that needed it more so you'd likely see nothing with your CPU by clocking the RAM higher.

I'm guessing that your setup will only allow higher than 1066MHz by overclocking the CPU as well.

If you do want to overclock the CPU you should see if you even need to. For games, run the Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL), leave it running and run a game for a while, quit then look to see your processor history. If it's maxing out at 100% you'll benefit from an overclock. I'd probably not go above 10% myself even with a good heatsink/fan combo.

If you want more help give your motherboard name.

I have an XFX 790i Ultra mother board . I did see my CPU running at 100% whenever I would play a game. Overall I think that I should wait till I get more knowledge then overclock my CPU with the ram to get a better benefit. From the looks of it, my CPU is the biggest bottleneck at the moment. Anyways thanks for the responses everyone!

The caches in modern CPUs mean that memory is actually accessed for perhaps only 10% or less of the instructions that use memory. And perhaps only 30 to 50% of instructions access memory (depending on what you're doing). So this means that memory speeds only account for 5% or less of the overall system throughput.

So if you increase the memory speed by 10%, you'll only see an overall performance improvement of around 5% of that - in other words, 0.5%.

This is an oversimplification, but you get the idea...