Motherboard/Memory Compatibility

[rain6460]

Hello,
I'm putting together my first machine using the GA-880GM-D2H motherboard. I know the board handles up to 1600 MHz ram, so I purchased 8 gigs of Patriot's:

Viper Xtreme Series, Division Viper 2 Edition DDR3 8GB 1600MHz Low Latency ram.  Patriot part# PXD38G1600LLK

After I ordered from a source that told me it was compatible with this board, I visited the Patriot website and found that this memory was actually designed primarily for Intel's 2nd Generation Core processors. I then contacted Patriot's tech support by phone and could not get a definite answer one way or the other. The tech said the memory was designed for and only tested on Intel systems. He said it may or may not run, and if it does, may not run at full specs. The sales person that sold it to me indicated I may have to change a few bios settings, but it shouldn't be a problem?

If anyone out there has knowledge on this, or possibly tried running this type of memory with this particular board, I sure would love to hear any feedback you may have. I'd hate to fire this thing up for the first time, only to find out it won't run because of incompatibility!  

Thanks for taking the time.

Sincerely,

Jeff

PS After posting this I read Absic's comments concerning "AMD AM3 CPU's and RAM SPEEDS." At this point I'm just hoping this ram runs...even if I have to live with 1333MHz. Still would love to hear from anyone with direct experience with the components I have. Thanks again.

[Christoph]

it will work even at 1600 MHz

most people have their sig with 1600 MHz ram, which as you've read is not recommended

and yeah there's a possibility that the RAm won't run at full speed, but for that you have to test

"RAM made for intel's" is just marketing...

[absic]

Hi there,

By default, the Motherboard will set your RAM to 1333MHz and the RAM Voltage to 1.5V and it should work without too many problems at that speed.

[rain6460]

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

So if I understand correctly, a monster 6-core AMD processor like the one I'm going to use, cannot safely handle ram speeds above 1333MHz? 

[absic]

It probably will, my 1090T seems OK with 1600MHz RAM (4X2 GIG sticks) but, according to AMD, the official speed is 1333MHz.

When I actually wrote the article about RAM Speeds I spoke to AMD Technical support, here in the UK and I was told that they couldn't guarantee the Memory Controllers if you run RAM above 1333MHz and that they had actually experienced CPU Memory Controller burnout on one of their own systems when they ran RAM at 1600MHz.

There are plenty of people who decide to run their RAM at 1600MHz who may never encounter a problem. On the other hand there are the 50 or so cases that I am aware of where people have run their RAM at 1600MHz and lost their CPU because of this.

The information is there for you to make your own judgement call. I decided to run my RAM at 1333MHz and have overclocked my 1090T CPU to 3.8GHz which, I believe, is a safer way to go.

[rain6460]

Thanks again for your input. As a layperson who is not very computer savvy, I just can't understand why AMD would limit it's biggest and fastest chips in this way? I know there's fierce competition with Intel to to get the latest products to market. And without knowing how they do their testing, it's difficult to know how or when they became aware of this limitation. Or maybe it was by design? With these memory controllers on the chip, maybe it's just not possible to achieve total stability with memory running faster than 1333MHz. Or like I said, with the pressure to get this stuff to market, maybe there just wasn't time to fix it. Who knows. It is what it is I guess. As fast as all this technology moves,  I'm sure there's probably an AMD six core chip that can handle faster memory just around the next corner!