There are some excellent motherboards for overclocking, like Asus’ P4C800, that are sadly marred by a lack of enough Vdimm to get ultra high speed DDR sticks to really flex their muscles. While there are volt modding tricks that can be done to get around these limitations, they are for diehards only, and can leave you stuck with a dead board. Enter OCZ to the rescue, with the DDR Booster that aims to make volt modding simple enough for everyone. Does it work?
The DDR booster is a voltage modification device that gets around the limitations of your motherboard’s Vdimm limits in bios by pulling in extra power from the PSU, and sending it directly to the dimm slots. No cutting, slicing, drilling, or soldering of any kind is required. OCZ says that the DDR booster supports up to 3.9V, but the maximum will depend on your motherboard, and ultimately what your ram is willing to take. It is possible to break 4V with a few boards. The handy digital LED readout tells you what your effective voltage is.
As you can see, the DDR booster is designed as a standard dimm module, making installation a roughly 2 second affair. Just find an empty dimm slot and insert it, preferably one where you will be able to read the LED display. There are three heat sinks sitting on the DDR boosters power chips, and unlike pretty heat spreaders on ram, these are absolutely necessary, as significant voltage increases causes these chips to get very hot. If you are going to go above 3.4V, OCZ recommends that you actively cool these sinks.
The black knob above the heat sinks controls the amount of voltage that the DDR booster adds to the system. The warning sticker tells you when you first power on to set this knob to its minimum setting, as you don’t want to boot with 4.1V volts zapping your ram and causing smoke and other nasty things.
The second step in the install process is to plug in the DDR booster to your PSU. You do this by chaining the supplied cable on to your main 12V ATX line, and then attaching the two molex plugs to their correspondingly colored connectors. That’s all there is to it.
