Can i put DDR3 PC15000 (1866Mhz) or PC1600 (2000Mhz) into MOBO Asus P5E3 Premium with no trouble ??

Question

Hi

This is my very fist custom build PC.

I have Q9450 and Mobo Asus P5E3 Premium. (Other VGA and Power Supply are comming)

The thing is the MOBO's specs support 4 x DIMM, Max. 8 GB, DDR3 2000*/1800*/1600/1333/1066/800 Non-ECC,Un-buffered Memory ( *Overclocking speed)

First of all, i looked at PC12800 (1600Mhz) which is native supported by the board. But the price not a big different between PC12800 and PC 15000 or 16000, so i a little confuse about this.

Question are:

Should i buy DDR3 higher than PC12800 like PC15000 or 16000... can i put in on the board and change the latency to 9-9-9-24 (or other digits ---> of course with correct digits)). Will it gonna work well ??

OR:

Buy a PC12800 (1600Mhz) and overclock it to 1866Mhz ( can those RAM really can OC to 2000Mhz ????)

Guy, please help me out.

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

You can use whatever DDR3 ram you want in that board. As far as overclocking 1600 or any ram that depends on the ram and your overclocking knowledge. Not gonna bump 1600 up to 2000 if you dont know anything about overclocking. Just run 4GBs (2X2) 8 GBs is overkill and 2 sticks overclock better than 4 sticks and puts less stress on the Northbridge. People seem to have good luck running 2000 Corsair Dominator or Crucial Ballistix on that board. May want to read the reviews for your board at newegg and see what the people who have the board are running with success. Asus also has forums for each of their boards where you can get a lot of info about what they run also. The faster the ram, of course, the slower the latencies. Will have to run looser latencies the faster you clock the ram.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...

I use Corsair ram in all my builds and am running Dominator on my Vista gaming rig on an Asus X48 board.