I was/am having issues with Guild Wars 2. After several weeks of removing programs I thought might be causing problems and a couple of support tickets to Anet support team I finally got a response back that my RAM was overclocked at 939MHz while the factory speed is 800MHz. My RAM is G.Skill Ripjaw X DDR3 1866. I guess my question is, isn't the 1866 number supposed to be the speed of the RAM? My motherboard defaulted the speed at exactly 1866MHz, so I assumed that was the speed. Am I missing some form of hidden numbers here? I've set my motherboad to auto detect RAM speed and so far I haven't had a single issue with Guild Wars 2. Also, can overclocked RAM speeds cause other problems, such as flash player crashing? I thought I knew the basics of RAM and all the numbers that go along with it, I guess not. Any help is greatly appreciated.

@Spiritgod: RAM speed is weird, there's something about it being doubled (DDR stands for Double Data Rate) so whilst your ram is 1866 speed RAM it's actual clock speed should be half that (933). Something like that.

However, in regards to your second point (flash player crashing) I'm having the same issue too! It keeps happening on Youtube, are you using Chrome? I'll be watching a video and it freezes but sound keeps playing, then it'll tell me that Shockwave Flash has stopped working shortly after. It started a few weeks ago and is super annoying - I had already signed up for the YouTube HTML 5 beta but sadly not all videos come up in the HTML 5 player, and it's gotten to a point when I don't see the HTML 5 player I expect a crash!

@Chavtheworld: Is it possible for a company to state the clock speed as 1866, or 939, and even have the PC see it at that speed, but have the actual factory speed be 800? Which if that is the case then I wonder if that might be the same reason behind me having bad sticks of RAM. I've had to replace this specific brand of RAM three times in less than a year.

The flash player crashing issue I have has been with me for as long as I've had this PC. I assumed it was just not having a 64 bit flash player, but now I'm starting to think it was always the RAM. All I can say is that if the RAM I have was meant to be run at 800MHz but they sold it to me as 1600 or 1866 (whatever number you want to use) then I'll never buy from this company again, regardless of how many gamers have such high praise of them. With my MB auto detecting the speed I've checked it at 800MHz, which is a little irritating since I paid for faster speeds.

The 'speed' of your RAM is 800MHz. And it's 939 MHz. Also, it's 1866.

The RAM's standard clock speed is 800 MHz. It's probably been overlocked to roughly 939 MHz, which is fine. It's fairly common for RAM to be sold overclocked above it's default speed. The 1866 is the number of bits per second per channel and is twice the clock speed (give or take some rounding errors) in all DDR RAM.

Overclocked RAM can cause issues, but it's also an easy scape goat. RAM that's overclocked too much causes general system instability. I wouldn't expect issues specifically with one game.

The 'speed' of your RAM is 800MHz. And it's 939 MHz. Also, it's 1866.

The RAM's standard clock speed is 800 MHz. It's probably been overlocked to roughly 939 MHz, which is fine. It's fairly common for RAM to be sold overclocked above it's default speed. The 1866 is the number of bits per second per channel and is twice the clock speed (give or take some rounding errors) in all DDR RAM.

Overclocked RAM can cause issues, but it's also an easy scape goat. RAM that's overclocked too much causes general system instability. I wouldn't expect issues specifically with one game.

@Spiritgod: Everybody has to deal with faulty ram once in while, that's why every kind of Linux Live CD or Drive cloning tools (like Clonezilla) or UBCDwin, pretty much every freeware boot CD comes with metest86+ included, to make sure that ram is A O K, before anyone starts to do anything. It will also show you the numbers (Bandwidth, Latencies etc), whether you run in dual or single channel mode and so forth. It will also show the speeds of the CPUs cache memories.

Generally integrated graphics performance greatly benefits from faster 1866 or 2133 RAM, whereas discrete video cards have their own DDR5 memory and those systems almost see no measurable improvement at all.

Faster Ram also has some use for overclocking: CPUs with locked multiplies without a "K" at the end of their designation can only be slightly tweaked by changing the bus speed, thus also overclocking RAM. I don't think that's something people do nowerdays.

This is what memtest look like with errors:

@Eurobum: I know about Memtest86, I run it on a semi-regular basis after getting this RAM, which I've had to replace three times this year.

Since writing in this forum, I've come to the conclusion of my problem not being RAM related. Though, my PC seems to run more smoothly with my RAM set below what I believe should be default settings. I do appreciate the info, I did learn a bit. I was just curious over speeds, since Anet kept telling me that I had overclocked RAM, and when I hadn't tweaked this machine, I was having a bit of a hard time understanding how the RAM I purchased could be really set for a different, lower speed than what I paid. I understand about overclocking and why some people do it, but I'm not one of those people. No where on Newegg did the RAM I purchased say "overclocked to 1866", and so nowhere should it tell me that the default speed is 1600.

@Devildoll: You're right, my motherboard specifically states that anything over 1600 is overclocked speeds. Next time I'll take note, and spend a little less on RAM that doesn't need to be overclocked. Guess this is customer error. At least I know for future reference, and will not make this mistake again.