- Back to homepage
- Related articles
  Related articles

Running Samsung TCCD at DDR600+ on DFI nForce4

Memory by kakaroto @ 2005-03-25

Getting your brand new A64 S939 to overclock to high DDR600 speeds is not an easy feat. Even with high quality memory you still need a lot of tweaks to get everything running stable. In this guide we show how to reach stability at DDR600 speeds on the nForce4 board from DFI.

Test Goal & Method

Test goal and method

In this guide I will help you to get your TCCD memory running stable at your stock rating and above.

I have used the following modules for testing:

G.Skill PC4400 1GB LE (Samsung TCCD 431) (2x512MB)

G.Skill PC4800 512 LA (Samsung TCCD 440) (2x256MB)

If you use other TCCD based memory products like OCZ, PQI, Kingston, Corsair etc. you also can use this guide. But with the variety of PCB's and different TCCD revisions used I can not guarantee if you'll obtain the same results.

The goals:

G.Skill PC4400 1GB LE @ 275MHz (DDR550) and @ 300MHz (DDR600) (CL2.5-3-3-6 1T)

G.Skill PC4800 512 LA @ 300MHz~ (DDR600) (CL2.5-3-3-6 1T) and @ 320MHz (DDR640) (CL2.5-4-3-6 1T)

Clear I think :)

Users with a DFI nF4 Ultra/SLI motherboard would have known that this board has a very detailed memory setting menu in the BIOS. These settings are same on the DFI nF3 UT 250Gb board. If you don’t know what all those settings mean, I recommend you to read this guide first

All those settings are important to tune the memory to be able to run at DDR600 and beyond. For users who do not own a DFI nF4, they can use A64tweaker 0.5 for windows, this program allows you to change advanced memory timing related settings straight from within Windows.

The method

To test stability, I will use a well-known program called Memtest86+. This program is implemented in the BIOS on the DFI nF4. You can download the new bios from the DFI website.

1. Test which module combination works best on your motherboard. This is a strange step. Sometimes two modules works better if you switched them from place. Always use the orange banks. (2 and 4)
2. Test the memory on e.g. DDR600 with minimum voltage. (~2.7v). If you get 20 to 50 errors in Memtest86+ you can tune the memory from there. If you get plenty of errors you have to increase the voltage or lower the clock speeds.
3. If you are done with tuning on a specific speed, try to clock further with more VDDR or signal strength (Drive/Data strength).

In this article you have seen me writing about stable speeds. My criteria of stable are a minimum pass of 10 times in Memtest86+ test 5 without errors. Piece of cake you might think, but this won’t be easy especially when you are trying to get high speeds stable with 1GB ram. This kind of stability is game stable and Prime stable for at least an hour.

Bios version

As you might know, DFI is a motherboard manufacturer that often releases new BIOS updates which is very great. I use the newest bios 3.10P (P for Performance) which gives you better compatibility for different kind of memory.

Which TCCD is the best?

A difficult question to answer is; what revision if TCCD is the best? At this moment there are five revisions: 425, 431, 437, 440 and 449. According to some users experience, newer TCCD are performing better at a higher voltage

Onto the test setup ->

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.