Enabling XMP reaises CPU Frequency?

Celgadis

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Nov 17, 2014
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Hi!

First of all, thansk a lot in advance!

I have just added some memory to my rig and, although it says it is 1600 9-9-9-24 it only works like that in XMP (or at least that is what I have found out). So I enabled XMP on the bios with the 1600 9-9-9-24 1.5v profile and now cpu-z show it rigth (well, it show 799.9MHz...:D).

What worries me is that I see the CPU frequency has increased. I mean, before the change when the pc was iddle the frequency dropped to 1600-1700MHz and now it seems to be always at 3700Mhz.

May it be due to the change on the XMP? Are there any risk I should check if I enable XMP?

Without XMP enabled CPU-Z showed the ram as 800MHz 11-11-11-28 and when I add another 2x2gb set (same brand and specs) it dropped to 668.7 MHz 9-9-9-24.

With the XMP enabled I get the 12GB total with 799.9MHz and 9-9-9-24 but I don't want to hurt my system just to get faster ram.

Thanks a lot
 
Solution
Sometimes to get RAM above a specific speed, the motherboard must do some component overclocking. My old i5 750 motherboard was like this with my DDR3-1600 ram, it natively supported 1333, but in order to use my 1600 @ 1600, I had to OC a little bit (which was not bad!) Just make sure your CPU temperatures are ok, and you don't gain instability from the OC process. You should be fine!

Concerning your idle frequency, checkout Windows Power Options, specifically the minimum CPU state.

Control Panel -> Power Options ->
Pick your "Preferred Plan" (Balanced for my case). Choose "Change plan settings".
click "Change advanced power settings".
expand "Processor power management"
expand "Minimum Processor state"
Mine is at 5% (default)...

BrandonYoung

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Oct 13, 2014
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Sometimes to get RAM above a specific speed, the motherboard must do some component overclocking. My old i5 750 motherboard was like this with my DDR3-1600 ram, it natively supported 1333, but in order to use my 1600 @ 1600, I had to OC a little bit (which was not bad!) Just make sure your CPU temperatures are ok, and you don't gain instability from the OC process. You should be fine!

Concerning your idle frequency, checkout Windows Power Options, specifically the minimum CPU state.

Control Panel -> Power Options ->
Pick your "Preferred Plan" (Balanced for my case). Choose "Change plan settings".
click "Change advanced power settings".
expand "Processor power management"
expand "Minimum Processor state"
Mine is at 5% (default).

That said, you probably wouldn't notice that much of a difference running the ram at non XMP speed.
 
Solution


Nah, they're unrelated. Something else is either keeping your microprocessor busy or preventing it from entering a low power state.

I have my PC running at DDR3-2133 using an XMP profile and the CPU regularly idles at 1200Mhz.
 

Celgadis

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Nov 17, 2014
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Thanks a lot both of you!

I've been playing for a while and the GPU temp never raised above 72ºC and the CPU never got over 49º and I had no problems or inestability so it seems everything is fine :).

Also, I checked the power options and I was using high performance... switched it to balanced and now I get 1600MHz on iddle! :)

Thanks a lot again!
 


Excellent. Balanced should always be used unless the user is trying to conserve power or is experiencing issues with certain real-time applications being unable to keep the microprocessor busy enough to prevent it from going to sleep (Wildstar had this issue)