Question XMP Not working with 4 sticks. How to manually bump the bios settings.

[Khant_Kyaw]

PC Specs:
RTX 4070Ti
i7-14700k
MSI Pro z790s-wifi
Corsair Vengeance 6000Mhz CL36 16x4 (64GB)
MSI A850GL PSU 850W Gold

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I have 4 sticks of Corsair Vengeance 16GB RGB 6000Mhz CL36 totaling 64GB
These are from 2 32GB (16x2) kits.

I am not very good with pcs and I initially bought 32GB due to budget issues and had planned to upgrade to 64 with another kit later in the future. And that time came and after I bought the new 32GB kit, I found out in task manager that my ram was running at 4000MT/s which seemed really low to me. It was originally running full at 6000Mhz when it was just 2 sticks.

So I did some youtube learning and came across enabling XMP setting in the Bios and when I enabled XMP I get an error message " Memory overclocking failed" when my PC boots up. So I thought I had a faulty ram so I did a lot of swapping slots and sticks and found out that when I put a stick in ram slot 2 and 4 ( the optimized slots ) it runs at full 6000Mhz but in slot 1 and 3, it runs at 4400Mhz. But with all 4 sticks it only runs at 4000Mhz. I assumed it should at least work at 4400Mhz.

I'd prefer it running at the full 6000Mhz if possible because I somehow felt like I noticed the difference when running some ram intensive games like "Rust" for example. It ran much smoother with 32GB 6000Mhz but with the new 64GB 4000Mhz I come across some stuttering in game.

I have updated the Bios because most threads included a lot of people saying to update the bios first but it still didn't work. I also see a lot of threads talking about how it can be done by manually bumping up the voltage and timings and things like that. So I'm hoping someone could help me out with that like I'm a 5 year old because I have no idea how it all works.

I'd appreciate any kind of help, Thank you!

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Your issue is very likely do to the fact that you are not running 4 factory matched sticks. 2 kits with the same part number are NOT matched, and are not guaranteed to run together.

 

[LinuxDevice]

Whenever you use multiple memory sticks all sticks must be able to run at a given timing, or else they cannot run together. During boot there is what is called "hardware training" whereby the BIOS attempts to run tests on the RAM at various speeds, and the speed basically increases up to the XMP speed, or else it finds the highest frequency clock which is stable (somewhere slower than XMP). Apparently the training is finding that all memory sticks combined cannot run at the XMP speed. There is no way to improve this.

There is a reason why people are told to buy all sticks in the same package. This is because there are a lot of timings associated with the RAM, and even though some basic speed might be compatible on different packages, it doesn't mean that all timings will match. When you buy them in a single package they match. Certainly there is a chance that if you buy a second set of RAM sticks which "look" like they match on the cover, then they might match. If everything is not an exact match on the package it is close to certain that you cannot use XMP with both packages. Since the BIOS has determined that they cannot run together matched at the faster timing there is no possibility of using all sticks together at that fast timing no matter what you tell the BIOS to do.

 

[Khant_Kyaw]

Whenever you use multiple memory sticks all sticks must be able to run at a given timing, or else they cannot run together. During boot there is what is called "hardware training" whereby the BIOS attempts to run tests on the RAM at various speeds, and the speed basically increases up to the XMP speed, or else it finds the highest frequency clock which is stable (somewhere slower than XMP). Apparently the training is finding that all memory sticks combined cannot run at the XMP speed. There is no way to improve this.

There is a reason why people are told to buy all sticks in the same package. This is because there are a lot of timings associated with the RAM, and even though some basic speed might be compatible on different packages, it doesn't mean that all timings will match. When you buy them in a single package they match. Certainly there is a chance that if you buy a second set of RAM sticks which "look" like they match on the cover, then they might match. If everything is not an exact match on the package it is close to certain that you cannot use XMP with both packages. Since the BIOS has determined that they cannot run together matched at the faster timing there is no possibility of using all sticks together at that fast timing no matter what you tell the BIOS to do.

Your issue is very likely do to the fact that you are not running 4 factory matched sticks. 2 kits with the same part number are NOT matched, and are not guaranteed to run together.

Thank you for your help! I also suspected that different kits were the problem however, this adds a second question. Would it work if I bought a full 64GB Kit at 6000Mhz on all 4 sticks even though, like I mentioned above, the ram stick as a solo only runs at 4400 in slot 1 and 3?

 

[--SID--]

Would it work if I bought a full 64GB Kit at 6000Mhz on all 4 sticks

Not guaranteed. Better use a 2x32GB kit if you want 64GB.

 

[LinuxDevice]

Thank you for your help! I also suspected that different kits were the problem however, this adds a second question. Would it work if I bought a full 64GB Kit at 6000Mhz on all 4 sticks even though, like I mentioned above, the ram stick as a solo only runs at 4400 in slot 1 and 3?

If all sticks come in the same package, and all are rated at 6000 MHz, then odds are high that it will work at that speed (however, there may in rare cases even be some motherboards that fail). If all sticks are the same rating, but sold in different packages, then odds of success drop quite a bit (but they might work at XMP speeds).

Incidentally, a solution with two sticks for a given amount of memory is more likely to succeed than using four sticks of memory; more sticks means more hardware must match. Slot 1+3 is more likely a better solution than slots 1+2+3+4. Any single 64 GB stick which runs entirely on slot 1 is the absolute best chance of success, but running dual channel has speed advantages. Unless you have some motherboard which advertises that it can use quad channel (I don't know of any), then your best performance is a 2-stick solution in slots 1+3, which happens to also have a higher likelihood of success than using all four slots at once for that same amount of memory.