A big 'Thumbs Up' for my new GA-970A-D3P Mobo

[trublubiker]

I posted previously about upgrading to this board and now I'd like to give an update on it's installation.

Well it all went without a hitch. As someone said in my previous post, the drivers were the same, so it was a painless swap.

I decided to utilise the overclocking capabilities of my Phenom II X4 955 BE and edged it up to 4.0MHz. It has been happily chugging away at that speed and performing all my usual processes for two weeks now without a hitch. This was achieved by simply changing the multiplier to 20X.

So what about trying to get my memory up to it's rated speed. I know from reading stickies in this forum that the Memory Controller on the 955 chip maxes your RAM speed to 1333MHz by default.

My RAM is two different sets of G.Skill F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL, bought about 18 months apart, so I thought there may be incompatibility problems and didn't worry about trying to get it up to it's rated speed.

However, today I decided to give it a try. I found a step-by-step guide on the G.Skill Tech Forum and tried it. Bummer!! No BSOD but W7 hung on loading. Went back to the BIOS, set everything I'd changed back to 'AUTO' and activated the XMP profiler to 'Profile 1'.

BINGO!! My RAM is now running happily at 1607.4MHz

I'd just like to say that I moved from Asus to Gigabyte mobos a couple of builds back and I couldn't be happier. The Asus boards are good platforms too, but I just had too many frustrations with GPU compatibility.

Thank you Gigabyte for the GA-970A-D3P motherboard. I can thoroughly recommend to anyone requiring a mainstream non-SLI platform.

[absic]

Thanks, it's always nice to get some positive feedback. 

It's nice to see that you have your RAM Running at 1600MHz but it would be much safer for the memory controller, which is built into the CPU, if you revert it back to 1333MHz and the actual speed difference is really not noticeable in day-to-day applications.

[trublubiker]

Cheers.

Is there any history of stress from running your RAM @1600MHz.

[absic]

Yes, I have personal details from approx 100 users who had their Phenom ii CPU's fail when running at 1600 MHz which is why I wrote this sticky: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,2515.0.html

A few years ago, I spoke to an AMD Technician, here in the UK and he had experienced a Phenom ii CPU failure on his work system due to running RAM at 1600 MHz.

Of course, there will always be some user's who have experienced no issues at all. But, as they say: "You pays your money, you takes your choice." I know that after the research I did and my discussions with AMD and various sources, I haven't taken the risk of running any of my Phenom ii CPU's with RAM running above 1333 MHz.

[trublubiker]

Thanks.

I did some research and it backs up your statement that there are no significant performance gains to be had running at 1600MHz.

I guess I really only wanted to see if I could.

Been there, done that!! Back to 1333 for me.

[absic]

That's exactly how I felt about the whole situation.