Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Short questions before i buy some memory.

Feb 3, 2015 11:04PM PST

I want to buy "2400MHz Kingston HyperX Savage CL11" (16GB) but i do not want to overclock it right now.

If i leave it at the stock (default) speed (i guess 1600MHz?) will it be CL9 or CL11?

Can i change the CL11 to be CL9 (or lower?) as long as it is at speeds of 1600MHz or 1866MHz?

Can the "2400MHz/CL11 Savage" work at 1866MHz/CL9 (or 1600MHz/CL9) just as good as the other Savage model that is "1866MHz/CL9"?

Thanks for helping out.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
Frankly, if I can't check the dozen or more parameters
Feb 4, 2015 1:19AM PST

I head to Crucial.com to get the memory and I'm done. Overclocking is one of those tar pit bad ideas who goes there because of what bad things can happen ideas. No one I know offers support for that because of owners that corrupt hard drives then want blood.
Bob

- Collapse -
Answer
Ram
Feb 4, 2015 2:06AM PST
http://www.kingston.com/datasheets/HX324C11SRK2_16.pdf

Looks like the stock setup @ 1600 will give you cl11.

If you make that lower (ocing) your on your own.

I played with that ram timing stuff in the past.
Even a ram bench mark had trouble telling the difference.

So same answer as in your original post.
Get 1600 ram...low cl if it's not crazy expensive and leave it alone.
- Collapse -
Answer
overclocking RAM is very bad idea
Feb 4, 2015 1:52PM PST

Much worse than overclocking a CPU, which either works or quits working (overheat or die). Reason is the typical desktop RAM has no ECC in it and the data on your hard drive can be slowly corrupting and you don't realize it till too late. The system files are already on hard drive, read into RAM, so if they get corrupted while in RAM the computer crashes, then they get read again from harddrive on reboot and all the while, it's the data files you are saving which have the corrupted data in them, and each save corrupts it worse. Eventually you realize some file you saved is corrupted or some configuration file in the system is changed, or it can't even read the system in without corrupting it, and the system crashes to not reboot again. Server RAM with ECC checks the data from RAM, but doesn't happen on regular desktop. I had a hard drive that got hit that way due to RAM being damaged by failing capacitors and it was amazing how many files I'd saved had errata in them. It was not a fun time.