Running 12gbs of Ram on X58A-UD7?

[metal_god69]

Hello all
I am just wanting to hear some stories from anyone that is successfully running 12gb on the X58A-UD7 motherboard?  Are you still able to run at manufacturer recommended timings and voltage?  I would think that voltage increase on the core and VTT might be needed for that much memory?

Thanks all I am absolutely loving this UD7 board.  What an amazing piece of hardware!!!

Cheers!!

[stereoud7]

hi i have a 920 DO and 6 x 2 gig dimms in my x58a ud7. have comp @ 191x20 mems at ~1530mhz 8-8-8-1t.

i had to replace my 6 sticks of OCZ plat w/ some 8-8-8 corsair xms mems to get it to run right. still having a hard time getting it stable at anything higher than this speed. had it really close at 4.3ghz but to get it rock solid @ 100% load the best i can do is 3.85.

on another note: I have a H50, an open air case with lots of fans, and 6 samsung f3s in RAID 0. getting >800mbs and >5gbs burst in HD tune . using 32kb stripes.

[Eftegarie]

How interesting posts! both of your posts resemble my upgrade wish.

Both 12GB and raid 0 with extreme multiple discs are also what i had in mind for my new system. Any recomendations from you owners?

CURRENT old system:
X48T-DQ6 / E8500 / 4 x 1TB Seagate @ RAID 0 128kb stipes; 420mb/s; once a month a full disc clone with acronis / 4GB ocz / Antec Signature 650W

NEW desired system:
UD5 rev2? OR UD7 rev2? /  i7 950 (Intel halved prices!!) @ 4ghz / 12 GB OCZ 1600 value ram / 4 TB raid 0 and 5 dvd burners / Antec Signature 650W

do you own the rev1 or rev2? is there any of the noise-problems (only audible in quite room) present in your ud7 versions or any other problems i should be aware of? which rev do you advise me? Planing to buy it in coming weeks. will post back my results for the 12 GB setup here.

[Dark Mantis]

I am running this board with 6Gb of Corsair Dominator 1600 mhz RAM, been considering adding another 6Gb but can't really see a good reason for it at the moment. The board is great(rev 1.0) in my opinion better than rev 2.0 as they have cut back on the power phases on the newer board. I liquid cool mine and it is almost silent apart from a resonation that I do not think would be noticable if it was air cooled.

The downsides, well I bought two Western Digital Black SATA3 6Gbs hard drives to run in a RAID0 configuration to get the advertised 4x the speed of SATA2 but no way! This is only partly due to the Marvell 9128 controller but more so to do with the drives. Only now have I found out that WD dont recommend their Blacks for RAID as they don't support TLER and therefore they tend to get dropped or not even picked up on boot.

In general an excellent board and if it were not for the Marvell chip I would say perfect. I think this is an unbiased view orf this motherboard and as honest as possible. Hope this helps.

DM

[Balthazor]

For 24/7 use my CPU is at stock bclk, multiplier, and voltages.

I use 12GB (6 x 2) Kingston HyperX, rated at 2000.  I use XMP Profile 2 on this memory, with QPI / VTT and DIMM voltages set to Auto, which translates into 1.3v and 1.65v respectively using XMP Profile 2.  I use a manual memory divider of 2:12, which results in my memory running at 1600 MHz; I leave timings on Auto, and this results in 8-8-8-24 2T using the XMP Profile 2.

I can't run this memory with stability at 1866 (2:14 divider) even with 1.42 VTT, so I gave up.  You might have better luck with other CPUs, but I didn't want to push the VTT on my 980x too high.

I'd review the memory qualified vendor list for this board, as there are several 12GB configurations supported, and those will be your best bet.

[Eftegarie]

Dark & Balthazor, thanks both of ya!  I see... so it could be that with 12 GB installed, I should shave off some of my overclockinbg expectations?

Does that mean by the way that it could be better investing in the 980x and less ram? (since faster processor clears its usage after completion faster allowing ram to become free again). I use lots of multimedia mutlitasking all the time, switiching from dreamweaver to premiere, importing a flv video into site, updating php file uploading to server immediately checking it in firefox,... haviing many apps open switching back and forth. My current X48T / E8500 @ 4Ghz (dual core) / 4GB ram (only 2GB in use often!) Win7 64bit  system experiences very slow...

I was/am hoping a new Quadcode i7 950 will give me a fresh fast performance, but am a bit afraid I'll have to wait bit more and go for the 980x (if Intel will drop the prices of that 980x, when they introduce their 990x flagship in december 2011... so i'm still not sure which direction to go. The UD7 fits my needs best. Perhaps its the cpu power im lacking, not that much the ram.

Ontopic question to the original poster and viewers:
Two configurations costing more or less equal amount of $ / Euros. Now imagine:
(A) 6 GB RAM + faster cpu, together costing Z dollars
(B) 12GB RAM + slower cpu, together costing same Z dollars

Which one would you think will fit which apps / your use? And specify which kind of usage do you have onto your systems folks? Gaming / apps / php_dev / office / server / ... ?

Curious thing the ratio between investment in Ram / Cpu...

[Dark Mantis]

To be honest it is a swings and roundabouts situation. I would have thought that you would do better with your type of usage(graphics, multi-tasking etc) to have more memory. Even though it means not overclocking quite so much it isn't going to limit you that much. The increased speed of the processor is going to be quite a lot anyway.

[Balthazor]

With triple-channel RAM, the speed and timings of your memory will have negligible impact on performance in almost all applications; there is no need to squeeze every bit of performance from RAM using the x58 chipset.  I read one review that showed you don't see a performance impact until you underclock RAM speed to 800 MHz on this chipset.

Article on impact of memory speed and timings on performance in x58 systems:  http://techreport.com/articles.x/15967/8

So if cash isn't in abundance, get 12GB of RAM from the Qualified Vendor List for the board you are looking at, and don't necessarily worry about getting UberX, Exterminator, or whatever super costly brand of RAM.  The fact that the x58 chipset is triple channel will give your CPU more than enough memory bandwidth, no matter what you choose.

If you can afford a six-core CPU, great; at the moment they are extremely pricey, though.  The hyperthreading quad-core i7 CPUs will all be a noticeable improvement from what you are using now.