Just because you bought RAM that's rated at 3800, 4000, 5000 or whatever speed
doesn't necessarily mean your computer can run it stably at that speed. It's
not uncommon to enable your RAM's XMP and then see nothing but a black screen.
Or your computer boots up fine but then while you're playing games or running other applications
you're greeted by the infamous blue screen of death or your program randomly crashes to the
desktop. I'm not 100% certain about this because I'm not a memory expert
BUT
my understanding is what's going on is the memory controller on your CPU
isn't capable of running at your RAM's rated XMP speed.
The memory controller is what manages all of the data going to and from your RAM. XMP as I
assume you know is a form of overclocking. When you apply an XMP you're overclocking your RAM.
And while your RAM is rated to operate at that speed you are now also overclocking your memory
controller which is built into your CPU and it may or may not be able to run at that speed.
If your RAM's XMP pushes your memory controller faster than it's capable of running...
or pushes it right to it's limits... then you're going to have stability issues which will manifest
themselves as black screens, blue screens, random crashes as well as other system weirdness.
So what can we do to fix it? If you simply disable XMP
in your motherboard BIOS that will fix the problem.
BUT
now you're running the RAM you paid a premium for
at it's base speed which I don't think many people are going to be too happy with.
Also there are some of you saying, "I can't even get into my BIOS. After enabling XMP
all I get is a black screen and I can't do anything."
Well let's start with you guys first and then we'll talk about what we can do to get at least
some of the performance that you paid for back out of your RAM.
If you're experiencing a black screen you're probably freaking out right now thinking you
just bricked your motherboard or your RAM or something. Don't worry... everything is fine,
you just need to disable the XMP, and since we can't get into our BIOS
right now to do that we're going to need to clear our motherboards CMOS.
The CMOS is the chip on your motherboard where all your settings for stuff like your CPU clock speed,
boot device, RAM speed and a lot of other stuff is stored. When we clear the CMOS it will reset
all that stuff back to it's default/factory settings.
First we'll want to shut our computers power off and unplug the power cord. You're then going to
have to open your computer up. Some motherboards have a clear CMOS button on the motherboard
somewhere but most do not so most likely you're going to have to do this one of two ways.
The first is to use the Clear CMOS pins on your motherboard.
You may need to consult your motherboard manual to locate them
but this is what they look like. Simply bridge these pins with the tip of a screwdriver
or some other conductive metal object for 5 to 10 seconds and that should do the trick.
The 2nd way is to remove this round battery here on your motherboard. This battery provides
power to the CMOS chip allowing it to store all your custom BIOS settings like your RAM's XMP.
Pop this battery out for 30 seconds or so and that should
kill the power to the CMOS long enough to reset everything back to default.
Just FYI, your motherboards clear CMOS pins and battery are likely going to be hidden
behind your graphics card so if you don't see them right away you're going to need
to remove your graphics card to get to them. If you don't know how to do that I have a graphics
card upgrading video popping up in the cards right now and linked in the video description
that shows how to both remove and install a graphics card that should help.
Ok... now that we can boot into our BIOS again
let's see what we can do about getting at least some of that RAM performance back we paid for.
Just so you know this is going to be a quick and dirty tutorial because RAM overclocking is not my
thing. If you want to get a more in depth tutorial on manually overclocking your RAM where you adjust
the RAM speed, timings and the voltage and all that stuff; there are other videos on YouTube
you're more than welcome to check out. I'm one that only uses XMP because it makes overclocking
your RAM effortless. Basically providing you a one step toggle switch allowing you to skip the
often times very time consuming trial and error tweaking that is involved with RAM overclocking.
So anyway, my quick and dirty solution to the XMP crashing and blue screen problem is to first
enable our RAM's XMP. Before saving and exiting though we want to go into our BIOS' advanced mode,
go to the AI Tweaker here... select Memory Frequency and here we have a list of a bunch
of different RAM speeds. Some higher than our RAM is rated at and others lower. The problem we're
trying to solve is due to our RAM speed being too high so I'm going to pick the speed one step down
from my RAM's XMP speed and then Exit BIOS and save the settings. I'll then load up a
game or other application where I was experiencing crashing problems or whatever and see how it goes.
If it crashes again then I'll go back into my BIOS and bump the Memory Frequency down
one more notch and repeat the process until things run stably.
At this point if you really want to try to get the most performance possible and you're
willing to spend the time doing it you can adjust the timings and the voltage and stuff
but I've only very briefly dabbled in that kind of stuff. So I ain't gonna touch it in
this video. There are plenty of great RAM overclocking guides on the internet though
so you shouldn't have any problem finding one. Thanks for watching and the best of luck to you.