Public Service Announcement: Asus Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1, Corsair DDR4 RAM and XMP
November 20th, 2015This is totally off topic, but maddening for the handful of people who are having the problem, so, all regular readers, please skip.
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If you landed here looking for a solution to the “overclocking failed” error when trying to enable XMP with your Asus Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1 and Corsair DDR4 RAM (in my case, 16GB, 2x8GB, Corsair Vengeance LPX Series, CMK16GX4M2A2666C16, DDR4-2666): Updating the board’s BIOS fixes it.
My board came with BIOS 0901 and enabling XMP caused the overclocking failed error when trying to boot. It would only boot normally with XMP off and the DRAM running at 2133. People on forums are suggesting entering the DRAM timings manually, but I found that just upgrading the BIOS to 1302 made XMP work properly.
So, upgrade the BIOS, enable XMP and restart. That’s it.
Lawdy, I had a laugh reading this, as I hadn’t a clue as to what I was reading, both before AND after clicking on the hyperlinks. Jaysus.
pookie,
(wishing she had a propeller on her beanie
and refilling her glass o’ vino)
Apologies. It’s such a bunch of gibberish.
The translation is: I needed some heavy lifting capability for backtesting strategies in Multicharts. So I built a very powerful and quiet PC from components to replace my 2008-era Dell PC, which Owen, my eight-year-old son, will inherit.
There must be a decent number of computer enthusiasts in NZ because a lot of the best hardware components, including quiet cases and extremely quiet CPU coolers and fans (Noctua/Austria makes the best money can buy) are available here.
At idle to low load/web browsing/email the only thing I can hear on my system is the old style mechanical hard disk drive. When I unplug it and just run the solid state disk (no moving parts) I can barely perceive that the computer is turned on. Even with the mechanical drive spinning, something as quiet as a gentle breeze through the trees outside makes more noise.
Human readable explanation about the memory issue:
The system memory I bought is supposed to run faster than a baseline speed. Lots of memory is actually capable of running faster than this baseline speed, so Intel developed something called Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) which allows system builders to easily set faster memory to run at full speed.
But XMP failed to set the correct speed on my new motherboard. Updating the code that runs the motherboard fixed XMP and the memory then ran at full speed.
And no, this isn’t an ad for Apple’s iMac computers, which are this quiet right out of the box. haha