XMP Profile Discrepancy

[ApophisRVG]

Specs:

Ryzen 5 5600G w/ Radeon Graphics

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 

Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200MHZ DDR4

MSI B550-A PRO (MS-7C56)

 

Hey everybody!

 

I recently noticed a discrepancy between my posted RAM speed between CPU-Z and Task Manager with XMP enabled. Task Manager reported 3200MHZ whilst CPU-Z reported 1063MHZ, whilst my BIOS settings reported 3200MHZ in it's XMP profile which was actively selected.

 

 

I went to check if XMP was enabled to see if this was a real problem or task manager being finicky, and without editing any settings they began to both report 2133 MHZ (CPU-Z reporting half because it's DDR4 RAM? If this is wrong please let me know). When I went back to BIOS it began to report 2133MHZ despite XMP being enabled and configured to a 3200MHZ setting. I turned XMP off and set my DRAM Frequency to 3200MHZ, saved-and-exited and reboot. CPU-Z and Task Manager are reporting 3200MHZ and 1596.8MHZ respectively, which seems correct to me. I've noticed better performance (less stuttering) in Rust, a RAM / CPU heavy game. I also checked Speccy and it is now reporting 1598 MHZ as well.

 

My questions are:

 

— Is their an obvious reason that XMP is behaving this way? Am I potentially making a silly mistake that is leading to this?

— Is their any potential harm to my system that I could cause by the action I took?

— What program should I trust as the most accurate reading of my RAM speed? I've heard Task Manager isn't exactly great for this purpose, is this true?

 

Of course I appreciate your help in advance, I'm sort of new to all of this and you guys have always been fantastic in lending a helping hand

[RONOTHAN##]

2 minutes ago, ApophisRVG said:

CPU-Z reporting half because it's DDR4 RAM? If this is wrong please let me know

Yeah, that's correct. The advertised speed is in MT/s, which on DDR memory is always double the actual memory frequency which CPU-Z reads. 

 

4 minutes ago, ApophisRVG said:

— Is their an obvious reason that XMP is behaving this way? Am I potentially making a silly mistake that is leading to this?

XMP isn't reliable. It usually works, but issues like this can come up from time to time, especially on AMD based systems, though the fix usually is to just manually set the XMP parameters (frequency, voltage, and primary timings). You set the frequency which gets half the job done, though setting the voltage and timings will get the full rated performance out of the memory kit. 

 

Basically, you got unlucky. There is a history of Corsair memory having XMP profiles that don't play well with AMD CPUs, so that might play a role in it as well, though I'd probably more chalk this down as XMP being XMP. 

 

6 minutes ago, ApophisRVG said:

— Is their any potential harm to my system that I could cause by the action I took?

If you just set the frequency, that can sometimes cause instability if the kit requires higher voltages to hit that frequency, but that's about the only issue you can possibly run into given what you said you did. You aren't gonna damage your system or anything like that. 

 

8 minutes ago, ApophisRVG said:

— What program should I trust as the most accurate reading of my RAM speed? I've heard Task Manager isn't exactly great for this purpose, is this true?

Task Manager is about the worst program for reading any sort of frequency, it's very liable to just be completely wrong. I have a collection of screen shots of Task Manager being completely wrong about stuff, including things like saying my CPU is running at 40GHz (no typo, not missing a period). It's only really useful for seeing what programs are running, not what the hardware is doing. 

 

The two programs I'd use for checking RAM speed are CPU-Z and either ZenTimings or MemTweakIt, depending on whether your on AMD or Intel respectively. CPU-Z is the most reliable for reading memory frequency in my experience, I've yet to see where it's been wrong, but it doesn't tell you any of the memory subtimings that exist. ZenTimings and MemTweakIt are very good at reading memory subtimings, but they aren't that granular with memory frequency and can sometimes have issues reading BCLK values so the memory frequency can be a bit off when read from them since they can only really interpret the memory ratio, not the actual frequency. There are a couple others that work as well for reading memory timings, Ryzen Master can read memory timings, same with ASRock Timing Configurator and MSI Dragon Ball with Intel chips, those are just the ones that I use. 

[ApophisRVG]

1 hour ago, RONOTHAN## said:

If you just set the frequency, that can sometimes cause instability if the kit requires higher voltages to hit that frequency, but that's about the only issue you can possibly run into given what you said you did. You aren't gonna damage your system or anything like that. 

 

I've been playing Overwatch since posting and haven't run into any issues. Admittedly the game ran static 144FPS beforehand so it might not be the best stress test to make this assertion, but can I consider this generally indicative that my system is not having this problem?

 

If this issue does arise, will the correct voltages / timings be system specific to my hardware, or is their a way I can determine what they need to be set to?

 

I really appreciate your detailed response, you're really helping me understand better :]

[RONOTHAN##]

5 minutes ago, ApophisRVG said:

If this issue does arise, will the correct voltages / timings be system specific to my hardware

Yes, they're specific to the kit of RAM you have. If you look on the RAM stick itself, it should say something like "DDR4 3200 CL16-20-20-38 1.35V", or a little different. What you want to do is enter the first digit for the tCL timing, the second for the tRCD timing (sometimes referred to as tRCDRD on AMD boards), the third is the tRP timing, and the 4th is the tRAS timing. The voltage you want to set for the DRAM voltage. You can also get this info from the SPD tab of CPU-Z.

[Mark Kaine]

Have you installed latest version of GPUZ?

 

I think you should also install hwinfo64 and check the reported RAM speed,  cause to me this looks like an error in GPUZ, when BIOS and taskmanager say 3200... the BIOS typically wouldn't do that, youd instead get a warning that XMP profile is not applied during boot.

 

So if hwinfo64 also says 3200...

 

 

[ApophisRVG]

32 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yes, they're specific to the kit of RAM you have. If you look on the RAM stick itself, it should say something like "DDR4 3200 CL16-20-20-38 1.35V", or a little different. What you want to do is enter the first digit for the tCL timing, the second for the tRCD timing (sometimes referred to as tRCDRD on AMD boards), the third is the tRP timing, and the 4th is the tRAS timing. The voltage you want to set for the DRAM voltage. You can also get this info from the SPD tab of CPU-Z.

That is absolutely fantastic. I can't thank you enough for the thorough, easy-to-understand answers. 

 

8 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Have you installed latest version of GPUZ?

 

I think you should also install hwinfo64 and check the reported RAM speed,  cause to me this looks like an error in GPUZ, when BIOS and taskmanager say 3200... the BIOS typically wouldn't do that, youd instead get a warning that XMP profile is not applied during boot.

 

So if hwinfo64 also says 3200...

 

I've installed HWINFO64, this looks like a great program, thanks for the recommendation:

 

 

It appears to be working normally now. All of the programs (including Task Manager funnily enough) are now reporting 3200MHZ (or half for CPU-Z and Speccy). 

 

I switched from XMP profile 1 to XMP profile 2 despite them having identical settings and have not ran into the same issue.

 

Appreciate the help guys! 

[Mark Kaine]

15 minutes ago, ApophisRVG said:

That is absolutely fantastic. I can't thank you enough for the thorough, easy-to-understand answers. 

 

 

I've installed HWINFO64, this looks like a great program, thanks for the recommendation:

 

 

It appears to be working normally now. All of the programs (including Task Manager funnily enough) are now reporting 3200MHZ (or half for CPU-Z and Speccy). 

 

I switched from XMP profile 1 to XMP profile 2 despite them having identical settings and have not ran into the same issue.

 

Appreciate the help guys! 

yeah sometimes there are two profiles with same speeds but different timings, then typically only one of them will work,  seems you found the right profile now.

 

And no problem!