mervin

RAM often runs at less than its rated speed. That is normal. Many motherboards only register DDR2 DIMMS at DDR2 800 or DDR2 1066 speeds. In order to get your RAM to register at it's true speed you have to set the speed manually in the BIOS.

Also, RAM generally loses its ability to overclock as its capacity increaes. Don't ask me why this is, but it's true. 2 gig sets of RAM will almost always overclock better thatn 4 gig sets. You might also consider increasing your RAM voltage slightly with a 4 gig set. In my experience you always need a little more juice to run 4 gigs of RAM and up.

Next question. What BIOS version do you have? I don't generally recommend people upgrade their BIOS unless they're having hardware problems, but in your case it might not hurt.

1:2 or 1:1 would be fine. I believe 1:2 ratio is default? That is how it is on my abit motherboard anyway. If you want to max out your cpu overclock I'd keep it at 1:1 ratio for now. Keep in mind that as your cpu overclocks, your FSB increases with it. It's also important to tell you that a lot of people buy DDR2 1100 and 1200 RAM not because they want to overclock their RAM above those speeds, but because they don't want their RAM to limit their overclock, so they underclock the RAM in order to max out their cpu. By the time a highly overclocked cpu is maxed out the RAM running close to it's prorated speeds. Am I making sense? Sorry if I'm not. I am at work right now and I have limited time.

RAM timings are important, but as your RAM speeds increase you generally have to loosen the timings. I'm a firm believer that you should buy RAM with the lowest latency possible to begin with, and then loosen the timings as necessary as you are overclocking.

Gskill is great RAM. I think you made a great choice.

Higher processor speeds are generally better for overall system performace than higher RAM speeds. However, if you're doing a lot of read / write functions you are going to see a slight performance increase with your RAM running at 1138mhz. However, fact that your cpu is running faster in your first overclock leads me to believe it will probably negate that difference in real world performance.
There are generally only 3 things that will ever need to be increased in order to achieve a respectable overclock. RAM voltage, cpu voltate and your memory controller hub (MCH) voltage. All systems are different, so it's difficult to know what your voltage should be set at.



You are going about this all wrong IMO. You need to stop obsessing about your RAM speeds and first find out the limit of your cpu. You can't overclock a computer and keep it stable without taking things one step at a time. Drop your RAM ratio to 1:1 and set the RAM voltage to whatever Gskill tells you it's supposed to be at. Start overclocking your cpu a little at a time. As your cpu overclocks your RAM will overclock too, but becaue you've got your RAM running at a 1:1 ratio it's going to be underclocked so your RAM is not going to be your limiting factor for now. Keep increasing your cpu speed until you get a prime 95 error. Once that happens you'll probably only need to make adjustments to your cpu or your MCH. Adjust your cpu voltage first and only after getting more system failures should you beging to adjust the MCH voltage. You're going to have to take this is baby steps.

If you are truly interested in figuring out the limit of your RAM you might consider downloading memtest86. This program checks RAM stability, so you think your RAM is what's limiting you at 1138mhz than download memtest 86, burn it to a CD and then run the test to find out.