XMP vs Manual Overclock

[gent23mj]

I dont know a ton about XMP, other than I have it and it boosted my RAM from 2133 to 2400.  And that its supposedly optimal settings for memory overclock.  But my mobo, Asus Prime z270 has more headroom that I'd like to experiment.  If I play with the memory speeds, do I also have to adjust voltage and timings?  Or should I just trust that XMP is the way to go.

System:

Asus Prime AR z270
i5 7600k
16GB DDR4 2133 (2400 xmp)
M.2 + HDD
RX480

[ARikozuM]

XMP = Poor man's OC, it works and it's better than stock.

Manual = Takes your life away, but can be much faster once you tighten the timings and bandwidth to their limits. 

 

@MageTank has a RAM overclocking guide if you're interested, but be warned that it's a lot of text to understand. 

 

 

[Bananasplit_00]

a manual overclock should give you better performance, probably higher frequency and lower/same timings or just much better timings. its a pain to stress test it but its fun to do if you want to push up that Cinebench score by another few points

[steffeeh]

XMP is just the manufacturer's guaranteed RAM settings memory wise (i.e it might still not work because of other hardware disliking the configuration).

This means you might be able to squeeze out some extra juice out of the RAM sticks over XMP by manually overclocking it.

I usually just manually input the XMP settings, check if the system likes it, and then take it from there and do further overclocking and tweaking.

 

Though as stated above, one should only dive into memory overclocking if you really enjoy overclocking as one can argue wether or not the small performance increase is really worth the effort and time (at least at those low speeds).

[gent23mj]

Thanks for confirming my suspicions, guys.  I think for now, XMP seems the way to go.  I do enjoy it, but I enjoy playing games more lol

[dexT]

The way to get the best performance in a limited time is

 

Enable XMP

Up voltage by .1V

Raise freq to next divider

Drop CL by 1

 

If it wont post keep adding voltage within the safe limit.