all of the ram I buy including the overvolted comes with a lifetime warranty, the motherboards come with 3 years to lifetime warranties and the cpu also comes with 3 years.

if motherboard makers offer overvolting for the ram I assume they have designed the motherboard to compensate for the increased stress.... it's not going to affect the electricity bill in any significant way, if Intel's cpu's can't handle high volted ram then so be it I'll factor that limitation into the equation when choosing my next cpu.

if say for instance AMD finally releases a CPU to compete directly with Intel's cpu that doesn't care about ram voltage then I'll go AMD if Intel's can overcome the ram limitation then I'll go Intel and possibly save some coin on ram in the process..... likely not enough to make up for Intel's absorbent pricing but whatever the goal is perf and a little saved here but spent there means nothing.

as for the industry "practice" of overvolting ram...... bleh don't care their is plenty of ram on the market running at spec'd voltage and if you don't want overvolted ram then don't buy it, if you are complaining about a lack of selection your arguement is like complaining that you hate any car that isn't blue then whining about only being able to buy blue cars.

I and others are looking for best performance if my ram requires 2.1 volts to operate compared to 1.65..... wow!!!! how could I possibly care so long as the surrounding components were designed to allow for it.

I've been using Kingston Value RAM for the past six years (yes even on my gaming computers), so I'm not worried at all about this. Hardware comes down in price so quickly that overclocking doesn't mean anything to me. If anything, I've always experienced weird glitches anytime I overclocked in the past. Not worth it as far as I'm concerned.

sorry for the duplicate post!

See this...
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=3426

Could be simply be because part of the voltage circuit is on the CPU itself?

It would give the CPU an additional area of hardware failure due to running out of spec.

Anyhow, Intel and their motherboard partners are just covering their collective legal and warranty arses. They are saying basically "Do memory overvolting at your own risk, it is your fault if something breaks".

I do not see how this will stop the hardcore overclocking crowd. They do it anyway, know the risks quite well and can afford the "loss" for whatever reason.

the problem is that 45nm silicon is NOT meant to deal with high voltages and being an integrated memory controller leaves the controller at the same processes as the cpu. Trying running a 45nm cpu at 1.9v and see what happens.

edit:
don't forget, as memory cycles go up, their relative latency goes up up. Your bang per clock drops dramatically. Anyway, tri-memory channel is plenty fast for anything. One of the hardware review sites did a review of many different memory speeds and all that pre-caching cpus have now days left memory that was 33% 'faster' with under 5% improvement

GOOD. Maybe this will serve as a wake up call to the hundreds of folks shipping PLAIN OLD DDR2-800 kits requiring 2.1 to 2.4V. It disgusts me that I have to make "1.8-1.9V" one of my primary criteria when shopping DDR2, and I get half the selection or less that others do.

Sure, they're just the guidelines, but when your product requires the maximum an enthusiast mobo provides OR MORE just to run at the official speeds, UR DOIN IT RONG.

Who cares ?

Core i7 use tri-channel ram, so DDR3 1333 should give you the same memory bandwidth as DDR3 2000 in dual channel

The key words there are 'MAY' and 'RECOMMEND'. Intel and AMD also RECOMMEND that you don't over clock your cpu, they recommend you don't over-volt your CPU, but since AMD sells a CPU that is mult-unlocked, you can see they don't forbid it. Its just not supported or encouraged.

meant as a reply

I'd only use Low latency DDR3-1333 RAM with a Core i7 machine either, I've never really seen the point of this fancy non standard RAM.

i agree with most of the folks saying that low latency is where the value is.

This is a process issue. As the chips get smaller the voltages they use and can work with get smaller. Notice how the core voltage gets smaller with every process shrink? At 45nm you don't need many volts to cause punch through of the silicon unless you put lots of protection diodes etc on each pad of the die. These protection measures tend to slow down the signals, so to keep the memory controller as fast as possible they need to be minimised.

Intel is just keeping things very safe by this 1.65V limit. You can go higher but it will be easy to latch-up and even damage these signals.

And I'm sure the 45nm AMD devices will have similar issues/restrictions. Just Intel got there first!

Isn't this article (on the same page) taken into account?

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9...

I'd say a good portion of motherboard or RAM RMA's are probably due to non-1.8V dimms trying to be booted and not working. This move makes sense.