Overclocked Memory Breaks Core i7 CPUs

arcticstoat writes "Overclockers looking to bolster their new Nehalem CPUs with overclocked memory may be disappointed. Intel is telling motherboard manufacturers not to encourage people to push the voltage of their DIMMs beyond 1.65V, as anything higher could damage the CPU. This will come as a blow to owners of enthusiast memory, such as Corsair's 2.133MHz DDR3 Dominator RAM, which needs 2V to run at its full speed with 9-9-9-24 timings."

Comments

Re:Not news

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Overclocked = faster than factory clocked.

How much easier can you explain that?"

You could start by getting it right. Overclocked means clocking an integrated circuit in excess of the CPU manufacturer's specifications. It doesn't have anything to do with the clock rate the motherboard manufacturer chooses or allows to be generated.

Is it out of spec to push something beyond what a manufacturer sells it at?"

Very Good! You are starting to get it! Of course your sentence doesn't even parse correctly, but I see what you are trying to say, and yes; the definition of overclocking is clocking it faster than the manufacturer specs it at. Your confusion lies in thinking "it" is the motherboard and the manufacturer is ASUS, etc. Again, "it" is the CPU, and the manufacturer is Intel.

P.S. I've personally designed a PC104 compatible motherboard, so you might want to quit while you are way behind, rather than when you are phenomenally behind.

Re:Out of Spec

[kesuki]

actually, the bullshit is all coming out of the standards body for manufacturing memory modules. the one size fits all standards just aren't working anymore. yeah it's great for a mother board manufacturer that ram produced by one of 8 companies will all work in the same motherboard, but getting those 8 companies to agree about what the minimum and maximum bar of performance are just isn't working out.

cheap sub standard grade producers just want to churn out as much cheap ram as possible, and make it seem like that cheap sub standard memory is as good as anyone else makes, so people will buy it without thinking. yet on the other hand, higher performance parts are demanded by gamers especially, where technology needs to be pushed to it's limits to get the maximum settings of say crysis to work acceptably without choppiness.

yet the standards body doesn't want to issue standards for high performance parts separate from 'stock' parts so that power users can't just go to dell or the like and say 'but you don't have ddr3 ultra fast edition! which i need for my video game'

so overclocked parts are part and parcel with performance memory, heat sinks or heat pipes come standard on good memory parts with great latency needed to avoid choppiness in games with high performance (eg: crossfire 4870x2s or SLI GTX 280's)