RAM Timings for Corsair 1600mhz

Hello ,

  I just recently purchased a DS system, and so far couldn't be happier... well, almost, .

I got 4 gigs of Corsair 1600mhz RAM with my rig. I installed CPU-Z, and it's reporting that my DRAM Frequency is 800mhz, FSB:DRAM is 3:10, and timings are 9-9-9-24-27-2T.

My knowledge about RAM frequency and timings is very limited, but it's my understanding that these timing are "bad", and that's it's obviously not running at the advertised 1600mhz.

I would like to remedy this by configuring my RAM properly so that it works better. My system specs are as follows:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 (3.2GHz) (Quad Core) (Black Edition) (8 MB Cache) AM3 Socket  [[Overclocked to 3.84ghz]]

Extreme Cooling: H20: Stage 2: Corsair H70 Liquid CPU Cooler (High-Performance Edition)

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3 (AMD 790X Chipset) (USB 3.0) (Socket AM3)

System Memory: 4GB DDR3 1600MHz Corsair Dominator DHX (High-Performance)

Power Supply: 750W Corsair TX (Dual SLI Compatible)

Hard Drive Set 1: Operating System: 1x (500GB Western Digital (16MB Cache) (7200 RPM)

Video Card(s): 1x ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB


Now, ideally I'd like to get my RAM running at 1600mhz, HOWEVER, I read some rather alarming comments about my motherboard on another forum that said it isn't designed to run RAM at 1600mhz, even though it accepts a lot of 1600mhz RAM types and uses them, and this can result in long term damage to the hardware.

Can anyone confirm or deny this? And I'm not hurting my RAM at all by letting it run at half of it's native speed, right? I imagine if anything it's just 'underworking' the RAM.

In the meanwhile, I would like to get my RAM running at 1333mhz, as this frequency is officially 'supported', and I can sleep better at night knowing I'm not slowly killing my machine. Looking for some help for the steps to do that.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, however I don't like messing with BIOS and overclocking settings at all, or anything that runs the risk of potentially damaging hardware, so if I do need to go into the BIOS to mess with the timings and stuff, a step by step of what to do would be wonderful...

Thanks all.

DDR = Double Data Rate.

800MHz x 2 = 1600MHz.

Also, if it works like Intel boards, you can multiply the "Bus Speed" reading on the CPU tab by the memory multiplier, which is the second number under the FSB:DRAM reading on the Memory tab to get exact numbers.

In this case your memory multiplier is 10, so I'm guessing your Bus Speed will read 160.

haha i skipped to the bottom, didnt even see the top