Hi all,

I have been searching the forums for this obscure detail that I remember seeing. First, a little background on why I ask:

5 months ago I was having problems with running Corsair Dominator memory at 1600mhz. After learning the X58 and i7, and many many posts here including the overclocking guide; I "fixed" my blue screens with adjustments in Vcore and VTT. Well, it wasn't totally fixed, I still had occasional blue screens every other week or so, always on going into standby though.

About 3 weeks back, the blue screens became much more regular, almost every 3-4th day. It's almost like my particular CPU is just ridiculously sensitive to voltage.  I finally gave up and clocked the memory down to 1066, I am done with trying to wring extra performance out of hardware. I generally buy highest quality stuff for efficiency and stability, I care little for benchmarks.

My machine has been running absolutely flawlessly for 3 weeks now, and as a human behind the keyboard-it doesn't feel any "slower", so I'm happy with it for the first time in 5 months.

Now, I am looking at a 3d graphics package (Carrera) and the box recommends "8GB of RAM for the intended experience." I saw a thread on this forum somewhere where people were having issues with 6 sticks of ram vs 3. Obviously, this makes me *very* hesitant to go backwards and have to deal with voltage adjustments etc. My question is simple: will my board require any tweaking if I add 3 more sticks of RAM? If it will require such tweaking, then where/how?

My hat is off to the incredible talent and professionalism of the people on this forum. My machine specs should come up in the sig. I will upgrade to a 650W modular PSU along with the 3 more sticks, I think 550W that I currently have is probably just a bit light.

If you are at default or lower clock speeds, you won't have an issue with 6 sticks.  It puts extra load on your motherboard memory controller, and requires a little more VTT and DIMM voltage, but not much. 

For example.  I'm running at stock on 1600 ram from mushkin.  I put in the stock memory timings, set the DIMM voltage to 1.65 which becomes 1.71 actual.  And I put the VTT at 3.75 or +125 VTT in the bios.  That's the upper threshold of VTT for my ram from the manufacturer spec's.

If you are overclocking, 12GB is hell.  6GB is much better for overclocking than 12GB.  With 12GB you take two steps forwards and one step back with each adjustment.  Stability constantly suffers.  But since you are stock, I wouldn't worry about it.

In your case though, I would be concerned that you can't reach 1600 without tanking.  If I were in your situation, I would get another 3 sticks of the same model ram, and RMA the ram you have.  I'm assuming you want to continue working on your pc.  That way you might get a pleasant 1600 mhz surprise when you get your ram back.  Good luck sir.

I am kinda hooked on Crucial after a decade of using theirs, I'd also keep voltage as low as possible (low voltage DDR3 seems to be the next step) and look at 4GB x 3 instead.

12GB kit (4GBx3), 240-pin DIMM, DDR3 PC3-10600 memory
http://www.crucial.com/st...bpoid=E84C4E70A5CA7304