Need advice on stabilizing RAM.

[mr1hm]

I recently sold my i5 3570k & Asrock Z77 Extreme4 for an i7 3770k and Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H rev 1.1 to better suit my needs. I consider audio production and engineering my first priority but, must say that gaming is probably equally important.

AIDA64 shows that the XMP profile uses 1.20v on the memory controller and 1.65v on DRAM voltage; I double checked this in BIOS and everything matched up. The BIOS shows profile VTT @ 1.20v but, even with the VTT Voltage option left on AUTO, it seems that the voltage isn't rising.
- Is it because the motherboard thinks it doesn't need to raise this voltage?

I've tried messing around with VTT Voltage and raising it to about 1.100v - 1.150v seems to definitely improve the stuttering of Battlefield 3 compared to the stock 1.050v which seems to cause stuttering in Battlefield 3. I'm using a Gigabyte GTX 670 OC and am using the latest 314.07 WHQL (I've tried different drivers just to make sure that it wasn't bad drivers causing the stuttering in BF3 which resulted in improvements but, ultimately resulting to the similar stuttering nightmare that I've been dealing with.

I've also read somewhere on the Overclock.net forums that Gigabyte Z77 boards require the IMC Voltage to be -.005v of the VTT Voltage if it's manually set. (e.g.: VTT Voltage = 1.100; IMC Voltage = 1.095v) I haven't tried upping the voltage on the IMC as I'm too scared to touch it.

I've tried everything that I could (except for the voltage raises on the IMC) and am open to all suggestions/ideas

Thanks

EDIT: Model is KHX1600C9D3K2/8GX and am using XMP Profile at 1600mhz and timings on AUTO in BIOS. Additionally, I've tried just setting timings and voltages at the rated specifications manually with no luck.

 

[itzdanielp]

Have you tried updating the BIOS? It could be a bug that has been fixed by Gigabyte.

Also, you should be good to manually set the VTT voltage, just don't over do it

 

[mr1hm]

Have you tried updating the BIOS? It could be a bug that has been fixed by Gigabyte.

Also, you should be good to manually set the VTT voltage, just don't over do it

Hey, thanks for your response, I ended up figuring it out 2 days ago.

Thought it was kinda weird but, it was HPET being used in windows through the "bcdedit /set useplatform=true" that was causing high dpc latency spikes . deleted the value through command and all seems well.

But, even after figuring out the problem... I ended up grabbing some 2xSamsung Green DDR3-1600 CL11 1.35v sticks which overclocked ridiculously well and have them currently sitting at 2133mhz around CL9 with about 1.5v .

However, very strangely, the new sticks is causing my Windows 7 start up/boot animation to stutter once again.... After deleting that command when the previous Kingston sticks were being used, the windows 7 animation was completely smooth with no signs of choppiness or freezes whatsoever but, the issue rising again after swapping the kingston ram out for the samsung ones is quite annoying.

Any suggestions for this?
- Should I try an re-enable the HPET through command for windows?
- Maybe the Samsung RAM will like HPET enabled in windows?
- Also, I tried upping VTT voltage before figuring out the HPET situation and while it did give me much better results, the latency spikes were still there.
- Also thought it may have been an unstable overclock on the samsung RAM but, it passes SuperPI 32m quite smoothly.

I'm really out of ideas as to what can causing the weird choppiness in the Windows 7 start up/boot animation (the 4 colored circles coming together to make the windows 7 logo).