When you think of overclocking, you usually think of the CPU, but overclocking your RAM also has benefits. I’ll show you how to overclock RAM on your PC.
When people talk about overclocking, they are usually referring to the CPU and GPU. However, it is also possible to overclock the RAM as well, and in some cases, it can lead to greater performance enhancements than any other tweaks you make. It’s not too hard to do, either. I’ll walk you through how to safely overlock your RAM with our tips below. Overclocking RAM improves the data transfer rate, which refers to how quickly the RAM delivers data to the CPU to complete a process. If your RAM is too slow, it can create a bottleneck that doesn’t fully utilize the potential of your CPU. The easiest solution to this is to just buy newer, faster RAM. However, you can actually bump up the speeds on your RAM manually as long as you don’t exceed the recommended voltage, and in some cases, you can only get the most from your faster memory kits by performing some system tweaks of your own. The most important thing to do when you start overclocking RAM (or any component) is to establish a baseline. Take note of your memory’s default speed and timings with a utility like CPUz, and then use some benchmarks to gauge its performance. You’ll also want to have a tool like HWInfo running in the background to keep an eye on memory temperatures and for finer frequency tracking. PassMark and AIDA64 are great synthetic benchmarks that will give you some raw bandwidth numbers to help figure out how much of an effect your overclocking has had. Cinebench is a CPU-intensive application that can show how much your RAM’s overclock has improved CPU performance. For more real-world testing, CPU-intensive games, like Civilization VI and GTA V, can give you a good idea of what game performance improvements you have managed to achieve. Most modern AMD and Intel CPUs support anywhere between 2,666MHz and 3,600MHz memory right out of the box, which means your motherboard and processor will default to running memory at those speeds.
