RAM will not overclock

[Garlic]

I am in the process of building my first real enthusiast PC, and naturally that means overclocking everything that makes sense and even some things that don't. However, as a total noob, it also means failing at a lot of things, and I am going to be posting about a few issues in the next couple of hours.

 

First of all is my RAM. I bought a kit of 2x16GB G.Skill Trident Z Neo rated for 16-16-16-36 at 3600 compute units, and I use it with a ASRock Phantom Gaming Z390/itx mobo and an i9-9900K. I tried the XMP profile first which unfortunately failed, and then I moved on to gradually increase the speed and tightening the timings, expecting to eventually arrive at the rated numbers. However, the furthest I have come is 22-22-22-56 at 3200 compute units before the computer fails and starts boot looping until I reset the UEFI.

 

At this point I suspect that the RAM is faulty, but I want to make absolutely sure that I am not just being a noob before I send them back to the vendor, and this is where I turn to you. I realize that there is a lot of things going on that I know nothing about, and there is a ton of settings that subtimings that I don't know what is in the BIOS, but I have been solely focused on CAS latency, RAS to CAS delay, row precharge time and row active time, which I understand well enough to mess with. Should I be messing with the subtimings to get further, or continue to leave them be? How would you go about overclocking RAM like mine?

[Firewrath9]

is the ram on the QVL?

[Garlic]

I actually didn't think to check that. Let me check.

 

It is not. None of the Trident Z Neo kits are.

[Jurrunio]

Is the memory voltage set properly (1.35v)? If it still doesnt work ramp it up to 1.5V

 

VCCSA and VCCIO could be tuned as well, up to 1.3V for SA and 1.2V for IO

[Garlic]

I left the voltage at the standard 1.35V. I´ll try to tweak that and see if speeds improve.

[Garlic]

Im back! I set the VCCSA and VCCIO to 1,2V each, and 1,45V for the RAM, and updated the BIOS from 1.30 to 1.60 hoping that the improved memory support would improve the situation, and I was able to reach 17-17-17-39 at 3200. 3300 still fails though.

 

Seeing as the kit is apparently not supported by my mobo and I failed to check before I bought it, I guess Im stuck here until ASRock releases a BIOS that supports it or I buy another kit that is actually supported.

[Garlic]

UPDATE:

 

I was lucky and was able to get rid of the Trident Z Neo kit and acquire a regular 32 GB Trident Z 3600 kit rated for 17-19-19-39 timings, and more importantly listed on ASRocks QVL for my mobo.

 

And... I hit 17-19-19-39 at 3200 compute units before I hit the same wall as before. The XMP of course fails, but somehow I did not expect that to work.

 

Now, with this new set I am absolutely sure that it SHOULD work, and yet it does not. Does this mean that my problem might be with the motherboard itself? Can the RAM kit be bad somehow? Or can it be something completely different?