Consider advice on improving a 9-year-old computer?
Consider advice on improving a 9-year-old computer?
XMP was first introduced by Intel long ago to boost RAM speeds beyond the standard limits, such as DDR3 at 1333 MHZ, DDR4 at 2133 MHz, and DDR5 at 4800 MHz. Users needed to turn on XMP in the BIOS for these overclocked settings. Until recently, AMD didn't offer its own overclocking profile, but now it does with EXPO. Most motherboards support both, though XMP has limited compatibility with Ryzen 7000 models and may encounter problems, so EXPO is recommended.
It doesn't matter whether the RAM uses XMP or EXPO anymore; updated BIOS and Agea codes for AM5 have greatly affected this issue now. What's important is whether the RAM is recognized by the motherboard's QVL or support list. I have XMP DDR5 and it boots perfectly without any adjustments in the BIOS, except enabling the XMP profile—this on an AM5 Gigabyte board because the RAM is officially supported, even though it's Intel's XMP.
Yeah, well my Gigabyte "B650 gaming x ax" claims to support XMP and it did at first, then when they released a new BIOS to support faster RAM and the x3d CPUs, I updated to it as I was still on the first BIOS released for the board. That was a huge mistake as I couldn't enable XMP at any speed without issues. I tried every BIOS version they had to try and find one that would work, but the early versions had been removed from their website and the later versions all had the same issues.
I ended up selling my RAM, which was G.Skill Ripjaws S5 XMP and replaced it with G.Skill Flare X5 EXPO, and all my issues were gone. So when I see someone suggesting XMP for Ryzen, I'm always going to tell them to buy EXPO instead...if your doing an AMD build, why would you not buy the RAM specially made for AMD?