Memory Z170 AR question

[Guest]

So in the middle of building my first computer and it wouldn't boot up into bios to test the system outside of the case. I then saw the LED indicating it was a problem with the memory. After taking out one stick it booted into BIOS. The problem here was that the memory was running at 1866mhz. To fix this I bumped up the speed to the rated 2666mhz. After that it worked with both sticks. The problem I have is I don't think I did it through XMP. I just switched the BIOS to advanced and then changed it. So do I really need XMP to OC ram? Isn't XMP like an auto overclocker for ram? There has been not problems so far and I'd just like to know I did everything right. 

[zzenigmaxzz]

xmp is to make ram run at its specified speeds, motherboards will generally downclock memory 

[2FA]

XMP makes the memory run at its rated speed automatically, you can of course do this manually which you did.

[Guest]

XMP makes the memory run at its rated speed automatically, you can of course do this manually which you did.

Oh okay good. So the rated speed of 2666MHz and CL15 is for XMP. So if I just changed the speed to 2666mhz then teh timings may be off? 

[NumLock21]

Boot into bios and see if it's set to XMP, probably the board detected your ram and set it by itself.

[Guest]

Boot into bios and see if it's set to XMP, probably the board detected your ram and set it by itself.

As I said I set it to that because it was running at 1866mhz. The ram is hyperx fury so it could of been able to overclock itself or something.