Question Which vendor has the best QVL's?

Sep 5, 2018
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I wad recently looking at motherboards and found that between the 2 different boards I was looking at (b450-f gaming and b450 aorus pro if you were wondering) the aorus board had a much smaller qvl, with 4 portrait pages up against asus' 21 landscape pages. It raised the question, which vendor has the best qvl in general?
 

Karadjgne

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Take QVL with a grain of salt. There's only a few actual ram OEMs (for the math I'll say 10) who make the ram for every brand/vendor (let's say 100) out there. Out of those vendors, each has 4000 different sticks according to model, color, size, speed, kit. So if Asus tested every vendor, every stick, what you'd end up with was a QVL that's a list of 400,000 individual tests, 10,000 of which are actually different, the remaining 390,000 tests are nothing but repeats of the exact same IC chips. Samsung 3200 CL14 is exactly the same as G.Skill Trident-Z 3200 CL 14, they use identical ic's, G.Skill buying Samsung B-die and putting a fancy branded heatsink on it in 4 different colors.

So vendors like Asus will grab and test a variety of ram vendors at different sizes and speeds to cover many different OEMs, but they'll not go nuts with huge lists because it's simply not cost effective to keep testing the same ic's over and over expecting different results.

So if there's a G.Skill Trident-Z on the list, that's Samsung, so expect G.Skill RipJaws V, Patriot Elite, Adata XPG, Samsung, and a few others to be compatible, if there's a Corsair LPX, that's SkHynix, so expect Patriot Viper4, G.Skill RipJaws IV etc to be compatible.
 
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Karadjgne

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Me either lol. I find a lot of stuff to be nothing more than marketing gimmicks. Software OC, eco settings on overclocking motherboards, my Z77 even has a programmable cpu load cap to save energy, I can set it up for 40%-70% maximum cpu load allowance. Why? OK on a B board, that's designed for business usage, help prevent overheating, but on a Z designed for OC, with probably a cpu for OC and a cpu cooler for OC? Crazy.