Well if it is indeed the registy, try using a system restore point from before the problem. Games might have to be reinstalled, but savegames should be unaffected.

I ran prime95 while the hardware monitor was on, and as soon as the processor hits a certain temperature, the comp shuts down. So it is an overheating problem. I don't have room for any more fans on the case so what else can i do?

What "certain temperature"?

Check that you installed the CPU heat sink properly. It may not be properly/tightly anchored to the motherboard.

I think it was around 60 degrees Celsius

That's not very hot, it shouldn't really be shutting your computer down at that temperature.

Well it consistantly crashes when it reaches that temperature. I'll upload a couple pictures of the comp tomorrow, hopefully that'll help you guys spot something I missed.

underclock your ram. and repeat. Then underclock your cpu and repeat. It's likely your ram is incorrectly timed.

How would I do this?

Go into BIOS or UEFI (whichever you have, it looks like it's a bios) and scroll around. There should be a setting there on overclocking or clock control. Something will talk about ram timings, or maybe ram speed. Set it to lower the MHz or the CPU:RAM ratio.

I now realize this is all pretty vague, but BIOSes are almost all different, which is why UEFI is taking its place.

My ram is at 9 9 9 24 right now, what should I set it to?

It's at 1600 MHz, you should set it to 1333 MHz for now. You might also kick the voltage up to 1.5 V (ddr3 is normally 1.5V, and your ram says it functions at 1.25 V), but I don't know if that will help.

You rock man! It seems to be stable now, I managed to get it to 64 degrees without crashing. It's still too soon to tell if its all clear but thanks everyone for helping me out, I would never have attempted this on my own

Very glad to hear it worked. My RAM doesn't perform at stock speed either. I'm not sure what you did, but try various settings on the RAM first to see where it won't perform at. I would do this now so that you don't have to bother with it later.

When overclocking (or underclocking) RAM, what you're really dealing with is response time--how fast does data go in and then back out again? There's a few methods for this and the whole process makes things pretty vague:

First is the actual clock speed of the RAM (1600 MHz etc...). This is the speed of each clock cycle, and is not controlled by the RAM per se. It's actually controlled by a ratio between the RAM the clock speed of the CPU. Sandy Bridge computers (the new intel processor) all have their base clock (or bus speed) locked down for a number of reasons, and there was a big hubbub about it when they came out. That clock is 100 MHz (on my AMD it's 200 MHz and I can change that). From there, there is a "multiplier" which kicks up the speed to something they can advertise, ie a 40x multiplier for 4 GHz. The important part for RAM is the base clock though. From there a ratio kicks in and increases that base clock to a certain amount.

So once you have the memory speed set, there's also RAM timings. Read up if you want, but I'll summarize here. The two most important timings are the CAS latency and the Command Rate. CAS Latency is the 1st number listed, usually for ddr3 it's at 7-10. The command rate is the last one, and it's either 1T or 2T. The lower the timing the better. Note that older DDR RAM at say 400 MHz could have a CAS latency of 2-3, so the numbers aren't really comparable between different clock rates.

So here's the graphic for CAS Latency VS Clock speed. Note that the faster the clock speed, the higher the CAS Latency usually is, making faster ram a losing battle. But here's the kicker:
CL 2 @ 400 MHz = 2/(200*1e6) = 10 ns delay
CL 7 @ 1333 MHz means 7/(666*1e6) = 10.5 ns delay
The clock rates are halved because it's "Double Data Rate". Yeah it's pretty much BS. The "faster" clock speed RAM isn't actually as fast as the DDR1 stuff. As you get higher, you'll notice that the CAS Latency increases significantly, or the voltage increases. Also note that the voltage directly influences power consumption: P = I * V or P = I^2 R, so if you increase the voltage, the resistance isn't going to go down at all, which means you're only going to be using more current, thus increasing power consumption. However at +0.25 V you won't be noticing too much of an increase. It's only really important in battery limited situations.

I'm sure there's other benefits to having DDR3 over DDR1, and it might really be faster in some cases, but I really don't think your RAM has much to do with the computer's overall performance. Obviously you want to put decent RAM in a good computer, but even the fastest RAM is still going to be limited by other things: your HDD, CPU, and GPU are all usually bottlenecks before RAM. There are many reviews on RAM which only show, say 58 fps with the lowest RAM, and 61 fps with $70 more expensive RAM. Your money is better spent elsewhere, like on HDD, CPU, or GPU.

Also, heat spreaders are gimmicks. The only thing that matters is price/GB and how much you need.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 21 2012, 9:42 pm by rockz.

What qualifies a DDR3 as a DDR3 anyway? What's the difference to DDR1?

answering my own question:


Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 21 2012, 11:35 pm by NudeRaider.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM This should shed some light on the subject.

Note that "worse" RAM can actually bench higher, so any differences can be chucked up to statistical variations.