RAM XMP Issue

[Ahhlong]

Hi guys, Recently My computer that I have used for quite a while when into some problem. I have a I7-4790k with a Maximus formula 7 watch dog edition motherboard and 4x4GB of Corsair Vengnence Pro 1600mhz ram. Ok so the issue is last time when I went into bios and set me XMP profile to the rated 1600mhz it had no problem so after awhile i went to overclock it up to 2133mhz and it was STABLE for like 3 months? Then recently I have no idea why when I on my computer it will take awhile before my speaker have the POST beep but after the beep it will go to the AMERICAN MEGATREND page, and rest my ram to 1333mhz. So i thought that maybe theres some overclocking error so I proceeded to change it back to the original XMP 1600mhz but now i cannot even run the XMP profile. When i select the XMP profile or any other speed it will bring me back to the AMERICAN MEGATREND page and reset my ram speed to 133mhz again. 

 

So I took out my ram one by one and gave it a try and the problem persist and i even flashed my bios to older version and it still have the problem. Would really appreaciate your help guys.

[Windows7ge]

You can attempt to run memtest86 to see if the overclocking has actually caused damage to the sticks already or alternatively you can skip XMP and manually input the speed/timing &/or rated voltage manually to see if XMP in itself has become the issue though I dont see how or why.

[chckovsky]

What DRAM voltage were you running?

[Ahhlong]

19 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

You can attempt to run memtest86 to see if the overclocking has actually caused damage to the sticks already or alternatively you can skip XMP and manually input the speed/timing &/or rated voltage manually to see if XMP in itself has become the issue though I dont see how or why.

How can I set the timings actually? Because when i overclock i put the timing as auto

[Ahhlong]

15 minutes ago, chckovsky said:

What DRAM voltage were you running?

around 1.51v

 

[Windows7ge]

1 minute ago, Ahhlong said:

How can I set the timings actually? Because when i overclock i put the timing as auto

There should be an option to set primary, secondary, & tertiary timings manually. if you found the option to set timing and it says AUTO then see if it has an option for Manual. It may bring up a drop down menu where you can adjust the timings yourself.  

[Ahhlong]

1 minute ago, Windows7ge said:

There should be an option to set primary, secondary, & tertiary timings manually. if you found the option to set timing and it says AUTO then see if it has an option for Manual. It may bring up a drop down menu where you can adjust the timings yourself.  

what timings should i set?

[Windows7ge]

15 minutes ago, Ahhlong said:

what timings should i set?

Look at the sticker on the side of the RAM. What will impact your experience the most is the primary timings starting with CAS latency. Match the 4 numbers. An example is 9-9-9-24 or 8-8-8-24 or 7-8-8-24. There's also Command Rate (1T/2T) adjusting this is really application specific as to if it helps but right now you're not overclocking so don't worry about that unless it's specified on the RAM sticker.

[Ahhlong]

On 20/07/2018 at 12:14 AM, Windows7ge said:

Look at the sticker on the side of the RAM. What will impact your experience the most is the primary timings starting with CAS latency. Match the 4 numbers. An example is 9-9-9-24 or 8-8-8-24 or 7-8-8-24. There's also Command Rate (1T/2T) adjusting this is really application specific as to if it helps but right now you're not overclocking so don't worry about that unless it's specified on the RAM sticker.

I found out the problem.. It was my CMOS ran out of battery... Anyways if i Wanna over clock my ram now can I put all the timing and voltage to auto and just select the ram speed to be 2133?

[Windows7ge]

10 hours ago, Ahhlong said:

I found out the problem.. It was my CMOS ran out of battery... Anyways if i Wanna over clock my ram now can I put all the timing and voltage to auto and just select the ram speed to be 2133?

So you replaced the coin cell? Good if that fixed the issue.

 

If you just want the RAMs rated performance enable X.M.P. again. Overclocking RAM gets a little tricky and depending on your platform will yield little to no performance gain in most applications.

 

To overclock the memory if you increase the RAM from let's say 1600MHz to 1866MHz you may have to adjust it's timing from 8-8-8-24 to 9-9-9-24 or 9-10-10-24 or 9-10-10-25. You may also have to adjust the voltage. It's typically recommended among most people to keep DDR3 under 1.7V

[Ahhlong]

17 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

So you replaced the coin cell? Good if that fixed the issue.

 

If you just want the RAMs rated performance enable X.M.P. again. Overclocking RAM gets a little tricky and depending on your platform will yield little to no performance gain in most applications.

 

To overclock the memory if you increase the RAM from let's say 1600MHz to 1866MHz you may have to adjust it's timing from 8-8-8-24 to 9-9-9-24 or 9-10-10-24 or 9-10-10-25. You may also have to adjust the voltage. It's typically recommended among most people to keep DDR3 under 1.7V

I just set all the timings to auto and voltage to auto too and it boots at a stable 2133. So should be fine right?
 

[Jarsky]

When you select the XMP profile, it will automatically adjust the voltages so yup as long as its booting and running stable you're fine. 

 

Like Windows7ge pointed out, overclocked memory can be a bit tricky. Some motherboards dont like running high frequency with all 4 dimms, some CPU's require a bump in VCCSA etc.. depending on its IMC so XMP cant always be reliable, as sometimes there may need to be voltage and timing adjustments...

[Windows7ge]

3 hours ago, Ahhlong said:

I just set all the timings to auto and voltage to auto too and it boots at a stable 2133. So should be fine right?
 

Jarsky brought up a good point that I forgot to mention. Only populating two memory slots on a four slot board (dual channel) can help stabilize memory overclocks quite a bit. Personally I prefer more RAM over faster RAM since the older DDR3 platforms (with the exception of APU's/iGPUs) didn't see much benefit from higher RAM clocks unless your workload specifically swapped large amounts of data in and out of memory. If overclocking the RAM was that easy for you that's awesome but I have to say it was never that easy for me. Be observant of any errors in Windows.

 

One particular obscure error I would only see when I had a bad RAM overclock was Chrome would fail to load web pages despite a perfect internet connection.

 

You may also get BSOD with crash codes specifically stating something RAM related.

 

You may also find applications crashing or not responding.

 

While you're at it fire up CPU-Z to see if the OS really sees 2133MHz. It'll be displayed as ~1066MHz. I've had instances where overclocks in the BIOS would be set but the OS couldn't see them.

[Jarsky]

5 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

While you're at it fire up CPU-Z to see if the OS really sees 2133MHz. It'll be displayed as ~1066MHz. I've had instances where overclocks in the BIOS would be set but the OS couldn't see them.

 

Windows 10 you can see this under Task Manager > Memory as well