SO I recently decided to upgrade my ram to 8gb.

I went with http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143844

1 of the 4x 2gb sticks is dead, tried it in all of the DDR2 slots on my Asus P5KC mobo. Each time same thing, everything powers up but I dont get anything on the screen. Sadly I gave the motherboard speaker to my sis when her comp was playing up, so I cant diagnose by post.

So 1 set is getting RMAd.

Then I noticed that the other set were in single channel mode, when they were set up correctly for dual. After a bit of fiddling I upped the ram from 2v to 2.1v, and theyre now in dual channel mode.

Being a complete noob when it comes to voltages and any form of overclocking, will have the ram at a slightly higher voltage than recommended do any harm or affect performance in any way?

Running over standard voltage is putting a fraction of stress on the ram and may or may not make its lifespan shorter.

But i wouldnt worry, people do it all the time.

Part of my confusion lies in the specs being 2v and then 2.2v on the ebuyer site. On the dims they say 2v, and Ive read somewhere they used to be 2.2v but they changed something to allow them to run at a lower voltage.

Does running in dual channel mode consume more power? Its the only reason I can think of that would require more voltage to run.

it shouldnt use any more power (bit of a guess tbh)

but if they were under powered, the might have needed a bit more to get them working properly...

run something like memtest86 and see how if goes
(leave it going one night, itll take bloody ages)

if theres any errors... up the voltage to 2.2 and try again....

better to find out any possible problems now than to have random crashes etc...

I had Corsair ram before set at 1.8v, the pc wouldnt boot, then i upped it to 2.1 and it worked fine.

So give it a night and see if it runs better with more juice, chances are its the wrong voltage at the start.

Aye. I think this mobo is a bit funny with ram too. Before with the OCZ sticks I had it mis-set the ram voltage on auto. This time also it set the timings to 5-5-5-18 when they should be 4-4-4-12.

Im such a noob I dunno which is better, but figured Id set them to what theyre meant to be ><

4-4-4-12 is faster, also that Ram is 2.2v, you need a min of 2v to power it up, but to run at its max rated settings you need 2.2v.

Problem isnt voltage but temperature. Providing the ram doesnt get too hot there isnt a problem with .1v or .2v. Its within 10% anyway.

Heres another ram question, also an everest one...in everest its correctly listing all 4 ram dimms, but in brackets it also says:

(5-5-5-18@400mhz)(4-5-5-15@333mhz)

Anyone care to explain? I presume theyre the timings if it was underclocked from 800mhz, or are those the speeds for each channel?