Since i had a little change from the sale of my old PC, and high on the score of a decent graphics card I went on the look out for some ram and I spotted a great price on Patriot Viper 4 Steel Series DDR4 32GB(2 x 16GB) 3600MHz Kit such a great price at under £100, I actually think it was listed in error especially as its now listed at over £160! So I snapped it up!
Rookie Mistake
I guess this was my first rookie mistake, while I did check the speed was supported by my board, apparently its important to check the memory compatibility list for your board before buying ram else there’s no guarantee it’ll work as advertised. I’ve never used Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) before however I was expecting to just be able to turn it on and be on my way.. I was wrong.
Slotting the DIMM’s in and firing up the machine worked fine at 2666mhz.. however enabling the XMP to take it to the full 3600mhz resulted in the PC hanging on the boot logo screen or BSOD during windows boot if it managed to get that far, I had to stop being a noob, grow a pair and head to the advanced settings on the bios.
I used the Try-It memory timings option in bios, starting with the closest to the rated 3600mhz and working down, I don’t mind not getting the full 3600 but close would be nice.. the try-it runs resulted in lots of failures and on one I had to reset the cmos entirely (which was what the try-it was supposed to avoid). eventually I ended up just resetting everything to default then changing just the frequency, 3333mhz seemed the highest I could go and be stable and I continued using the PC for work for a couple of days.
Lets do Games!
Finding a free moment I fired up Rust for the first time, I really fancied giving this a shot however I was to be met with crashes at random intervals, I obviously thought it was my new, second hand, graphics card and on digging my logs showing “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.” so maybe graphics card drivers.. I rolled back drivers and did some testing based around debugging the graphics card but still the same.
After some digging on the internet memory was mentioned so I got to thinking it could have something to do with that so I once again went on the trial and error offensive with the frequencies. I think I’ve found the sweet spot and the system is stable at 3200mhz, I could be annoyed at not getting the full 3600mhz out of this stuff, but I couldn’t have got 32gb of 3200mhz cl18 memory for under £100 so it’s still a win.
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