Guidance for RAM overclocking with various rates.
Guidance for RAM overclocking with various rates.
Hi guys. At the very start I'll say, please, treat me like a total newbie when it comes to overclocking RAM. Now, with that out of the way, my problem is this. For the past few months I was rocking a set of DDR4 2x8GB 4400MHz Thermaltake Toughram. Never got it to work at the advertised speed, since simply enabling XMP made it hella unstable, with a lot of WHEA errors showing up in testing. So I just never bothered to set it all up and left it at the auto setting, which gave me standard 2666MHz. Not bad, not amazing. Recently though, since my daily usage went way up, I bought a second set of the exactly same RAM, only a 3600MHz version of it, since it was the only one available at the time. All four sticks work with each other just fine on the auto setting, all displaying 2666MHz. I started thinking- "Maybe the faster sticks would work without errors at the speed of the slower ones?". So now I wonder, I know there should be a way to manually set up everything, so that ALL FOUR sticks would work at the 3600MHz speed. But I have absolutely no idea what to change in the BIOS so that I don't screw it all up, as most tutorials don't deal with the whole different speeds situation . I know I should change the voltage, but what about timings and such? I simply don't know ALL the things I SHOULD change for it all to work properly, I don't know what names of particular settings in advanced memory options mean, it's all basically close to magic for me. So... I would humbly require some assistance. The sticks are set in Gigabyte B550 Vision D Motherboard paired with Ryzen 9 5900X Processor. The RAM stick themselves are: -A set of 2x8GB DDR4 4400MHz 19-25-25-45 1.45V -A set of 2x8GB DDR4 3600MHz 18-19-19-39 1.35V Could I set everything up, even timings, to match the specs of the slower RAM? Would the faster one even work then?
choose the 3600 profile instead of 4400. It should work better with Ryzen chips, which tend to struggle above 4000MHz unless you adjust decoupling settings, though that might cause more issues.
They confirmed the kits were placed in alternating positions, such as abab.
Yes, of course. On my board slots go something like this: A1-A2-B1-B2 |-----|----|----| A2 and B2 should be populated first according to the MOBO manual, so that's were the 4400MHz sticks are, since I had them first. The A1 and B1 are populated by the second set of 3600MHz. So now that I think about it, I can be right thinking that just swapping the 3600 sticks with 4400 ones could cause the correct 3600MHz XMP profile to show up. Question is, will the XMP profile tailored to the 3600MHz sticks work nicely with the faster ones? Could it damage them somehow? Because I know the faster RAM should have absolutely no problems running at both lower speed and lower voltage, but what about timings? I don't know much about those and I imagine there is quite a difference with going from 19-25-25-45 to 18-19-19-39.
So I was starting to think I was wrong, but it turns out swapping the RAM positions fixed everything. It worked perfectly with the 3600MHz XMP setting. The original slots 1 and 3 didn’t work, but 2 and 4 did. My Gigabyte BIOS only recognizes one XMP profile at a time, which matches what I saw in my MOBO. After running memory tests for a few hours, I confirmed everything was correct—speed and timing matched the slower RAM. All tests passed: HCI MemTest, Windows Tool, Memtest86, and OCCT detected minimal issues. Compared to the chaos when testing 4400MHz RAM alone, this was a clear win.