RTilbury

I have an INTEL D875BZLK running one stick of Crucial DDR400 512mb memory. The CL is 3 i suppose. In my bios memory settings it gives me numbers "3-3-3-8" is it ok for me to use the "agressive" bios setting? I currently have it on "Auto". What does this do in fact, will it hurt my pc? When i enable "agressive" it changes my times to "2-2-2-5" I think.... Is this a better setting?

Also will adding another stick of DDR400 512mb increase my pc performance?


Thanks


Specs:
Intel D875BZLk - 2.8ghz P4
DDR400 512 mb
80gb HD 7200rpm
ATI 9600XT
Windows XP pro

Logla

Moved to Technology Discussion and Support

It should do any damage to your computer to run the timings more aggressivly and should marginally increase performance if the ram can handle the lower timings. If they cant handle them then the machine may crash, hang or just not boot, in which case you will need to reset your CMOS and try again.

And yes, adding another 512Mb should give you better performance.

Zardon

Aggressive settings means the ram refresh and access times are faster, meaning increased performance. Most decent DDR400 ram will handle 5(or 6,7) -2-2-2 and is certainly the settings you want to run at for the optimium performance. Its worth noting that not all motherboards will read the SPD timings that the ram manufacturer has set and will reduce (higher numbers). if you are going to increase FSB above the rams limitations you can sometimes get further performance increases by raising the ram voltage settings, 2.8 is generally a safe figure for most boards.

Adding another 512 meg of ram wont increase overclockability or benchmarking results but it will greatly aid windows performance with less paging (hit control alt delete and look in your memory section) and the more taxing games, such as farcry which use massive amounts of texture data. Anyone who has ran farcry on a 512 meg system will understand what im talking about, as sound data is loaded sometimes mid level.

This is a sign of how things will be with the coming titles like HL2, Doom 3, Unreal 3 etc. 1 gig is going to be the requirement for smooth FPS, good load times and overall performance.

reno

Yep, listen to Zardon.

From 512 MB to 1.5 GB is still a dream...although don't be prepared to get the performance I do out of it, stay safe with just 1GB.

tastyweat

that crucial stuff won't handle anything under cas 2.5

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RTilbury

Sorry i had the numbers wrong, with "agressive" setting on they are now 2.5-2-2-5, not 2-2-2-5. i have been using the agressive setting all day with no crashes, halts, slowdowns, or anything for that matter.