RAM voltage?

[wolfram23]

Hi, I'm looking for appropriate RAM in a MSI P55-GD65 mobo. I'm going with a 2x3GB RAM. Initially I was thinking the G-SKill ECO series which is low voltage but I found out a local retailer does price matching and has everything but the RAM that I found on newegg, so I'm just going to pick up the parts locally and save shipipng and time.

That said, I'm now wondering what RAM to pick up. The mobo says it supports "four unbuffered DIMM of 1.5V DDR3." However, I've also heard it's safe to go up to 1.65V with the i5 750 CPU I'm getting. So, which is it? 1.5V is fairly limiting it seems.

BTW, I'm checking out Patriot Viper II Sector 5 RAM with the specs 1.65V 8-8-8-24 timing and 1600mhz. It looks good on paper and it's a reasonable price so I'm wondering if it's ok?

 

[geofelt]

For any ram you are considering, do your own homework.
Go to the ram vendor's web site, and access their configurator.
Corsair, Kingston, Patriot, OCZ and others have them.
Their compatibility list is more current than the motherboard vendor's QVL lists which rarely get updated.
Enter your mobo or PC, and get a list of compatible ram sticks.

Here are a few links:

http://www.crucial.com/index.aspx

http://www.corsair.com/configurator/default.aspx

http://kingston.com/

http://conf.ocztechnology.com/index.php?c=1

http://www.patriotmemory.com/configurator/index.jsp

Cpu performance is not very sensitive to ram speeds.
If you look at real application and game benchmarks(vs. synthetic tests),
you will see negligible difference in performance between the slowest DDR2 and the fastest DDR3 ram.
Perhaps 1-2%. Not worth it to me.
Don't pay extra for faster ram or better timings unless you are a maximum overclocker.