I'm looking into building a version of the Honey Badger and noticed that Kingston Beast runs at 1.6v which is higher then Ivy Bridge CPU's rating of 1.5v.
I'm wondering if there could be any instabilities introduced from the get go? I intend to overclock my CPU but I don't want to have to spend hours in the bios once I get it to post. If I decide not to overclock does this mean I will have to underclock my RAM? I'm really not experienced with hardware so any advice or knowledge that you guys can share would be great.
tldr; How does you RAM?
By default, I'm fairly certain the Beast will run at a 1.5v setting. You will have to enable XMP to get the higher speeds, or you can try dialing in your settings manually (see if it runs at advertised speed @ 1.5v). I don't think voltage is that big of a deal. Countless of people claim to run 1.65v without issue, not to mention the controller is actually rated for 1.6v maximum, just not 1.65.
From what I read a while ago, but can't confirm, is that controller damage is actually due to the voltage difference between the CPU core and memory controller. Assuming this is true, if you intend to overclock, then using higher voltage memory shouldn't be a problem, as long as you're running a higher voltage on teh CPU core.
Lastly, if you still feel uneasy about running 1.65v RAM, get some Corsair Vengeance. Most of their stuff runs 1.5v, and still gets respectable speeds.
I have an old set of Corsair Vengeance. 4x 2GB DDR3-2000 @ 1866 10-10-10-27 1.5v
I guess I'm a little confuzed about the bottom line... Without the overclock the Intel CPU will be fine to handle the voltage? I guess I know with a little bit of work in the bios I'll be fine to run the memory but I'm not sure what I would need to do?
Most people can run 1.65v just fine, though Intel states a MAXIMUM voltage of 1.60, and there have been reports, especially with the 1st gen Core series CPU's (Nehalem), that higher voltage memory will fry the memory controller. However, from what I've read, it's not the voltage running through the memory, but rather the difference in voltage between the CPU core and Memory that causes the controller to fry. So, the bigger the difference between the CPU core voltage and memory voltage, the higher the chance of frying the memory controller, so a higher CPU voltage (ie Overclocking the CPU) should help it handle higher voltage memory.
It shouldn't be much of an issue anyway, since it will run a 1.5v setting by default, which will presumably be 1600. That is the sweet spot for Intel platforms, and you won't notice any gain in gaming performance from 1600 to 2400. It might affect video rendering, or other memory intensive programs, but programs that are more latency sensitive, such as gaming, will not benefit from extra memory bandwidth.