I might need to replace my memory

[Octopuss]

So I realized my board is incompatible with my memory's XMP profile. While I can set values manually, I feel like I don't have to put up with hardware incompatibilies of things that are supposed to work out of the box. Thus, I will see if I can get the memory RMA'd and possibly replaced.
Assuming the shop I buy from accepts it, I can possibly choose from Corsair (that's what I have right now and probably wouldn't want to get it again), Kingston, Patriot and Geil. Which one is likely the best in terms of compatibility and performance?

 

[Law-II]

Hi

This may be a good place to start

http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/Memory/mb_memory_ga-z77x-ud3h.pdf

Source - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4153#

atb (all the best)

Law-II

 

[Octopuss]

Already checked that.
It's no use, there's no 2x8GB in the list. Those supported memory lists are very useless.

 

[Widjaja]

Already checked that.
It's no use, there's no 2x8GB in the list. Those supported memory lists are very useless.

Yes I do believe the QVL list for some motherboard websites are never or rarely updated from the first BIOS or two.

Have you tried going to the forums of the RAM you are intending to get and starting a thread there?

 

[overclocking101]

So I realized my board is incompatible with my memory's XMP profile. While I can set values manually, I feel like I don't have to put up with hardware incompatibilities of things that are supposed to work out of the box. Thus, I will see if I can get the memory RMA'd and possibly replaced.
?

dont be surprised if they dont m8. it's really up to the user to make sure they make educated purchases with products of known compatibility. I bet they tell you to rma the board for one that wors with the memory, I had corsair do that to me once, only memory i could rma due to me not doing homework was through crucial, and that was because I did reviews for them back then

 

[Octopuss]

Widja: Yup I tried, but so far not very useful answers.
On top of everyting, Memtest passes without problems, but Prime95 throws out errors as quickly as 6 minutes in (it varies though).
For some reason everyone is mental about Memtest and take it for the holy grail of memory testing, but I don't believe that thing at all. It might be good for finding obvious and serious memory problems, but stability testing? Forget it.
The same applies to the much praised Intel Burn Test, by the way. With somewhat unstable system (in my eyes) I can cycle through it for hours without any errors whatsoever, and yet Prime95 would say no within an hour.

over: I don't expect them to accept it, but it's worth a try. Normal or advanced user, you can't really make any educated purchases other than choosing trusted and proved brands - and yet, you can run into crap like I did. It sucks.

My biggest hope lies in Gigabyte itself. MAYBE they will eventually get to test this. Fortunately Z77 is still the newest platform and probably the most developed when it comes to BIOSes.

 

[Octopuss]

Right, just got an email from the shop - they said no as expected. I will have to hope for Gigabyte to do something then.

 

[terrastrife]

I am assuming you're talking about yoru Vengeance 1866 kit? If so your CPU also doesn't support it.

If you are having trouble with Prime, try increasing the VCCIO/QPI voltage. Also, when you say Memtest passes, I assume you also mean looping a solid 8 hours of test 4 and test 6, because the other tests are pretty pointless...

A lot of RAM won't work with the default .9v or so QPI on the newer CPUs.

Anything above 1600MHz JDEC without CPU and Mobo means it's down to how good you are at overclocking.

 

[Octopuss]

Define doesn't support. By that logic EVERYONE with faster than DDR1600 memory would have problems, because afaik that's the highest speed IB CPUs "support".

I will try messing around with QPI though (just have to quickly find out which one of the obscure voltages it is first, everyone called them differently), cheers. Increasing normal DDR voltage didn't help at all.

edit:
Are you sure you didn't mean IMC?

IMC/VCCSA:
Starting with the second-generation Core i processors (“Sandy Bridge”), the VTT voltage was renamed to VCCSA, and is called “system agent.” It feeds the integrated PCI Express controller, memory controller, and display engine (i.e., the “2D” part of the graphics engine).


PLL/QPI/VCCIO:
Voltage used by the CPU clock multiplier (PLL, Phase-Locked Loop). This voltage can be changed through an option called “CPU PLL Voltage.”

 

[terrastrife]

Yes I mean anything over 1600 is pretty much overclocking by default.

The voltage you want to play with would be labelled VCCSA on your board, the default is around .9v and higher frequency ram usually has an XMP setting of about 1.1 or recommends a setting by the manufacturer (ie GSkill recommend up to 1.3v which is over intel spec).

You can probably drop the PLL voltage a bit if you don't have issues with clock fluctuations.

 

[Octopuss]

The XMP profile on my memory says something about "profile DDR voltage" and profile VTT voltage". What exactly is this?

 

[Aquinus]

The XMP profile on my memory says something about "profile DDR voltage" and profile VTT voltage". What exactly is this?

XMP specifies two voltages that should be set for a given ram speed. One for the DRAM voltage itself and one for the memory controller (VTT) voltage.

 

[Octopuss]

That's weird, I didn't notice VTT jumping up to 1.3V when XMP profile was enabled (those values in memory settings screen are always greyed out anyway)

Also, I am confused:
Vtt/VCCIO:
Available starting with the second-generation Core i CPUs (“Sandy Bridge”), this voltage is used for feeding all input/output (I/O) pins of the CPU, except memory-related pins. On CPUs that have this voltage, it is also used to feed the thermal control bus (PECI, Platform Environmental Control Interface).

Totally unrelated to memory.

 

[Aquinus]

I didn't notice VTT jumping up to 1.3V when XMP profile was enabled

1.3v on the VTT is a bit high. You shouldn't really ever go above 1.2v for a 24/7 overclock. At least that is the case with SB and SB-E. It might be even lower with the IVB since the IMC is that much more capable. I don't think cranking up the VTT is the answer. Does it work fine if you manually overclock it? If it does, then forget XMP.

 

[Octopuss]

No, I mean I don't understand how this works. When I enable XMP profile, the (all the time) greyed out value for "profile VTT voltage" jumps up to 1.3V (it's 1.05V when disabled, which is also the default value in CPU core voltage screen), but I don't know what it means. I would assume VTT voltage is set to 1.3V by doing so, but it's not the case.

 

[terrastrife]

No, I mean I don't understand how this works. When I enable XMP profile, the (all the time) greyed out value for "profile VTT voltage" jumps up to 1.3V (it's 1.05V when disabled, which is also the default value in CPU core voltage screen), but I don't know what it means. I would assume VTT voltage is set to 1.3V by doing so, but it's not the case.

It's greyed out as it's just displaying the XMP profile. You'd have to check the voltage section of your BIOS/EFI to make sure it's been applied or not.

 

[drdeathx]

FYI, of all the boards I tested, Gigabyte sometimes is quirky with some ram. Why, I could not tell you. Never have problems with Asus, ASRock or MSI. I would think it is a bios issue and hopefully there will be a bios update to rectify the problem with the specific ram.

As far as it not being stable with Prime95, it most likely may be a system stability issue not the memory. Like terrestrife mentioned increase voltage a bit. maybe a vcore increase will help.

 

[Octopuss]

I will have to go back to start and try it step by step. The downside of Prime95 is you can't be 100% sure what the problem is, it's awesome at "just" finding them where other tools fail.

I made a compromise at what I consider stable though: 12 hours instead of the usual 24+ I've always used.

So far it seems that setting memory to the same values as XMP manually improves it dramatically, but not fully. I just need to find out what the deal with "profile VTT voltage" really is.

 

[Octopuss]

Looks all I needed to do was raise VCCSA voltage after all (0.925V default -> 0.960V)