**Troubleshooting Memory Issues with Intel XMP Profile**

In our recent testing, we encountered a frustrating issue with memory modules that refused to run at their advertised speeds despite being configured for extreme memory profiles. The problem arose when attempting to utilize the XMP profile on an Intel platform, where the system would not boot up or stabilize beyond 3200 MHz, even though the Extreme Memory Profile (EMP) was set to 3600 MHz.

**The Baffling Case of 3.6 GHz Memory**

We discovered that even with the EMP profile enabled, the system would only run at 3200 MHz and then default back to a slower speed of 2665.36 MHz upon failure. This behavior was observed across multiple test machines, including an Intel I5 processor-based machine and an AMD Threadripper machine. We attempted to troubleshoot the issue by reducing the memory frequency from 3600 MHz to 3500 MHz, where it worked without any issues. However, when we tried to set the speed manually at 3.6 GHz using the XMP profile, the system consistently failed to post or stabilize.

**The Role of Memory Quality**

Our investigation suggests that the issue may be related to the quality of the memory modules themselves. We observed that certain memory sticks were prone to failing to reach their advertised speeds, even when configured for Extreme Memory Profiles. It is possible that these memory modules were manufactured with inconsistent parameters or had inherent limitations that prevented them from achieving their stated frequencies.

**The Importance of Quality Control**

In the production of memory modules, manufacturers often test a batch of products simultaneously and then release them to market based on their performance. This approach can lead to inconsistencies in the quality of individual memory sticks. We suspect that our memory module failures may be due to this issue, where certain modules did not meet the expected standards or had issues with stability.

**The Impact on System Performance**

As a result of these memory failures, we were unable to fully utilize the capabilities of our systems, as the XMP profile was not able to achieve its intended speeds. This underclocking effect resulted in reduced system performance and stability. We hope that this issue is isolated to our specific batch of memory modules and that future products will be more reliable.

**Reproducing the Issue**

We have successfully reproduced the issue on multiple machines, including an Intel I5 processor-based machine and an AMD Threadripper machine. This demonstrates that the problem is not specific to a particular platform or configuration. We believe that our findings can provide valuable insights into the importance of quality control in memory module production.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, we have encountered a puzzling issue with memory modules that refuse to run at their advertised speeds despite being configured for Extreme Memory Profiles. Our investigation suggests that the problem may be related to the quality of the memory modules themselves, rather than an issue with the Intel platform or XMP profile. We hope that this article will serve as a cautionary tale for manufacturers and users alike, highlighting the importance of reliable quality control in the production of memory modules.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone phil from tech for text today we're going to be looking at this kit from xpg which is basically a data's gaming brand it's got a cl rating of 18. it's 3600 megahertz there are other speeds available on the market you can get individual memory sticks and dual channel ones like this one ranging from 3 200 megahertz all the way up to 4133 megahertz with sale ratings as low as 16 up to 19 but again it might depend on the country you're in with what's available on the market this kit has got a recommended retail price or at least a street price of roughly 75 pounds but bear in mind that can change on a daily basis and will depend on your country and what's available and so forth we do have links in the description below if you click on that it'll take to the cheapest price available for this item on amazon in your country okay let's have a quick look at the box looks pretty straightforward red bolts black memory doesn't look like there's any rgb on it which is good in well some sensors not in others depends on what you prefer but in this case no rgb we'll look is that as a good thing uh as it says it's an xpg gamix d20 ddr4 memory is a eight gigabyte times two three thousand six hundred megahertz pc four eight on the back of the box you can roughly see the memory sticking through the back there looks like a bit of scuffing on the plastic insert and it basically just tells you in different languages what it is as in desktop you dim and which is obviously your standard dim you use on pretty much most desktops let's have a look inside the box and see what we've got okay so that's what you've got in the box and well there's not much it's just the memory there's no instructions as such in the box well there is it's actually printed on the inside of the box which can be a bit hard to see but you'd have to rip the box completely open to actually see the instructions but in all honesty memory should just be pushing and clipping so you shouldn't really need instructions to do that but if you do then have a look online but it's pretty simple there's no stickers nothing about warranty or anything like that um it's just that's all it's come with as you can see with the memory sticks let me show you so as you can see it's complete gloss black it's got xpg written on there which is sort of in the metallic effect so it does shine and catch the light at certain angles there's no rgb fitting on there it has got a heatsink that's what this black bit is on the opposite side you've got more information about what you've got it's basically identical both sides apart from this sticker which i don't like them on memory sticks but then again if you didn't have them people would get confused what speeds and everything was and so forth just to zoom in on that so you can see what it says but it's basically telling you the model number on the cl rate and your speed your voltage which is 1.35 which is your standard and warranty void if removed but otherwise it's pretty straightforward there's nothing special really to see there's nothing remarkable it's a heatsink it does have a few little holes on there but other than that that's pretty much it both sticks are identical but they do look pretty smart so if you're looking for a minimalist look case or just a little straight black you just don't want any rgb but you want some decent performing memory this is probably for you okay we're going to do a bit of out of the box setting up so we've got the memory inside the machine the machine is obviously turned on we've got the by ourselves as default so optimize default so everything is basically factory uh it's got latest bios update for this board and everything like that it's written in an i7 10 700 k processor and basically it's a modern day system so there shouldn't be any issues uh with it running the memory as it should so at the moment it's running on optimized defaults so let's go into the bios just to show you you'll be able to see that in a second when it restarts so let's get in that bios okay so it's running at the moment the memory speed at 2665.36 so let's just say 2666. okay so let's change this to the advanced mode and we'll put the extreme memory profile on okay so we'll put it on we also know that the memory voltage runs at 1.35 or at least that's what it says so we're going to change that to 1.35 volts i'm going to save that and that's all we should need to do and let's see what happens so we wait we wait we wait again and nothing happens after about three or four minutes the machine will reboot and then say can't do it please enter bios there was an error basically and we'll do that in a second just to show you okay so the machine actually started up that time where the other times i've done this it failed but one thing i have noticed if you're going to hardware info it's the same no matter what test to do in and press run and i'm just going to zoom into the screen so you can hopefully see the results there but you'll see the memory clock speed is running at 1600 megahertz which you think oh that's really low it should be 3600 now that isn't low it's because it's ddr memory you have to double that number so it actually works out at 3200 which is still slower than it should be and the reason why you have to double it ddr stands for double data rate so you have to double what it says okay so it's still not right because it should be 3600 after you've times it by two and it's not getting there the timing is correct so that's 18 20 20 which is what it says it should be doing so it seems a little bit strange so let me just restart the machine and we'll see what it says in the bios when it decides to get that okay so yeah frequency three one nine eight so three thousand two hundred megahertz even though extreme memory profile is set for three thousand six hundred and even on the auto it says three six hundred uh the voltage is right uh and so forth even so it says 1.38 even though i've told it 1.35 but whichever way you look at it it's not coming up right and we've reproduced this test on an amd board as well so we know it's not an issue with the intel platform so if i turn the xmmp profile off let's disable it set the speed manually for 3600 okay leave the voltage at one three five that's basically what it should be i'm going to leave the cat rating and everything as um it should be as standard we're going to restart the machine and see what happens let's see if this time it starts so we wait and obviously it does take a few seconds usually for bio settings to save and change then in theory by roughly about now we should be getting something and we're not uh this is where it will go onto the bit in a second where it'll fail and say can't do it and so forth and no matter how many times you try and get it going even by opening the voltage up to 1.4 volts which is uh 0.5 higher than it should be or should i say not 0.05 higher than it should be it still doesn't want to go i can drop the speed down to 35 3 500 megahertz works fine but can i get it to work at 3600 on actually three separate machines this machine another intel machine running an i5 as well as an amd threadripper machine doesn't want to know it so seems a little bit strange in all honesty um because we cannot get the speeds it says i've even tried it with one stick just in case there's an issue with them working in dual channel which shouldn't be really because that's what they're designed to do and i cannot get them to post properly at 3 600 megahertz here we go there's your fail message and this is what we get every single well every single time we try to do it manually and if you do it automatically it only runs at 3200 so and then it defaults back to when it fails 2665.36 so there's definitely not running at the speeds it's quoted don't get me wrong works at 3500 didn't crash one bit work did all our tests and it works as it should at three thousand five hundred works of three thousand two hundred and we actually got it working at three thousand two hundred with a cash rating of sixteen which is uh basically a better response time and it worked fine but for the actual what it's sold out as three thousand six hundred megahertz with a sale rating of eighteen on any of the machines we've got it does not want to work so in conclusion well we got memory sticks what wouldn't run at the speed that they're supposed to um it happens now and again um it's a bit like when you buy a processor some can overclock higher than others um it's all down to the quality of the actual memory uh what's in there and sometimes you get one or two sticks which aren't as good as others and that's usually why you get different speeds because they usually make them all a lot of time at the same time and then they test them and go right this one can do this speed this one can do this speed and then sell them at different prices but unfortunately in this case uh it didn't reach the speeds it was said to we could get it to post and run fine at 3 500 megahertz but 3600 just wouldn't have it even up in the sale rating to 20 um still caused issues and crashing we tried when we did manage to get it running um running cinebench and it would just crash out cinema bench or even blue screen the whole machine so we couldn't really do any proper testing on it because it wouldn't actually run at the speeds it should run at so otherwise we're basically underclocking it uh making it slower than it should actually be i'm hoping we've just got a bad uh basically pack of memory because a data memory is usually pretty good don't usually have any problems with it usually does what it says on the tin but unfortunately in this case on all our test machines it failed to do anything it said on the tin and just to clarify we have got other memory in from different manufacturers with the same specifications which work straight out of the box obviously when you enable xmp profile it picks up the speed and runs and works like it should where this failed to do that and even setting it manually it still failedhi everyone phil from tech for text today we're going to be looking at this kit from xpg which is basically a data's gaming brand it's got a cl rating of 18. it's 3600 megahertz there are other speeds available on the market you can get individual memory sticks and dual channel ones like this one ranging from 3 200 megahertz all the way up to 4133 megahertz with sale ratings as low as 16 up to 19 but again it might depend on the country you're in with what's available on the market this kit has got a recommended retail price or at least a street price of roughly 75 pounds but bear in mind that can change on a daily basis and will depend on your country and what's available and so forth we do have links in the description below if you click on that it'll take to the cheapest price available for this item on amazon in your country okay let's have a quick look at the box looks pretty straightforward red bolts black memory doesn't look like there's any rgb on it which is good in well some sensors not in others depends on what you prefer but in this case no rgb we'll look is that as a good thing uh as it says it's an xpg gamix d20 ddr4 memory is a eight gigabyte times two three thousand six hundred megahertz pc four eight on the back of the box you can roughly see the memory sticking through the back there looks like a bit of scuffing on the plastic insert and it basically just tells you in different languages what it is as in desktop you dim and which is obviously your standard dim you use on pretty much most desktops let's have a look inside the box and see what we've got okay so that's what you've got in the box and well there's not much it's just the memory there's no instructions as such in the box well there is it's actually printed on the inside of the box which can be a bit hard to see but you'd have to rip the box completely open to actually see the instructions but in all honesty memory should just be pushing and clipping so you shouldn't really need instructions to do that but if you do then have a look online but it's pretty simple there's no stickers nothing about warranty or anything like that um it's just that's all it's come with as you can see with the memory sticks let me show you so as you can see it's complete gloss black it's got xpg written on there which is sort of in the metallic effect so it does shine and catch the light at certain angles there's no rgb fitting on there it has got a heatsink that's what this black bit is on the opposite side you've got more information about what you've got it's basically identical both sides apart from this sticker which i don't like them on memory sticks but then again if you didn't have them people would get confused what speeds and everything was and so forth just to zoom in on that so you can see what it says but it's basically telling you the model number on the cl rate and your speed your voltage which is 1.35 which is your standard and warranty void if removed but otherwise it's pretty straightforward there's nothing special really to see there's nothing remarkable it's a heatsink it does have a few little holes on there but other than that that's pretty much it both sticks are identical but they do look pretty smart so if you're looking for a minimalist look case or just a little straight black you just don't want any rgb but you want some decent performing memory this is probably for you okay we're going to do a bit of out of the box setting up so we've got the memory inside the machine the machine is obviously turned on we've got the by ourselves as default so optimize default so everything is basically factory uh it's got latest bios update for this board and everything like that it's written in an i7 10 700 k processor and basically it's a modern day system so there shouldn't be any issues uh with it running the memory as it should so at the moment it's running on optimized defaults so let's go into the bios just to show you you'll be able to see that in a second when it restarts so let's get in that bios okay so it's running at the moment the memory speed at 2665.36 so let's just say 2666. okay so let's change this to the advanced mode and we'll put the extreme memory profile on okay so we'll put it on we also know that the memory voltage runs at 1.35 or at least that's what it says so we're going to change that to 1.35 volts i'm going to save that and that's all we should need to do and let's see what happens so we wait we wait we wait again and nothing happens after about three or four minutes the machine will reboot and then say can't do it please enter bios there was an error basically and we'll do that in a second just to show you okay so the machine actually started up that time where the other times i've done this it failed but one thing i have noticed if you're going to hardware info it's the same no matter what test to do in and press run and i'm just going to zoom into the screen so you can hopefully see the results there but you'll see the memory clock speed is running at 1600 megahertz which you think oh that's really low it should be 3600 now that isn't low it's because it's ddr memory you have to double that number so it actually works out at 3200 which is still slower than it should be and the reason why you have to double it ddr stands for double data rate so you have to double what it says okay so it's still not right because it should be 3600 after you've times it by two and it's not getting there the timing is correct so that's 18 20 20 which is what it says it should be doing so it seems a little bit strange so let me just restart the machine and we'll see what it says in the bios when it decides to get that okay so yeah frequency three one nine eight so three thousand two hundred megahertz even though extreme memory profile is set for three thousand six hundred and even on the auto it says three six hundred uh the voltage is right uh and so forth even so it says 1.38 even though i've told it 1.35 but whichever way you look at it it's not coming up right and we've reproduced this test on an amd board as well so we know it's not an issue with the intel platform so if i turn the xmmp profile off let's disable it set the speed manually for 3600 okay leave the voltage at one three five that's basically what it should be i'm going to leave the cat rating and everything as um it should be as standard we're going to restart the machine and see what happens let's see if this time it starts so we wait and obviously it does take a few seconds usually for bio settings to save and change then in theory by roughly about now we should be getting something and we're not uh this is where it will go onto the bit in a second where it'll fail and say can't do it and so forth and no matter how many times you try and get it going even by opening the voltage up to 1.4 volts which is uh 0.5 higher than it should be or should i say not 0.05 higher than it should be it still doesn't want to go i can drop the speed down to 35 3 500 megahertz works fine but can i get it to work at 3600 on actually three separate machines this machine another intel machine running an i5 as well as an amd threadripper machine doesn't want to know it so seems a little bit strange in all honesty um because we cannot get the speeds it says i've even tried it with one stick just in case there's an issue with them working in dual channel which shouldn't be really because that's what they're designed to do and i cannot get them to post properly at 3 600 megahertz here we go there's your fail message and this is what we get every single well every single time we try to do it manually and if you do it automatically it only runs at 3200 so and then it defaults back to when it fails 2665.36 so there's definitely not running at the speeds it's quoted don't get me wrong works at 3500 didn't crash one bit work did all our tests and it works as it should at three thousand five hundred works of three thousand two hundred and we actually got it working at three thousand two hundred with a cash rating of sixteen which is uh basically a better response time and it worked fine but for the actual what it's sold out as three thousand six hundred megahertz with a sale rating of eighteen on any of the machines we've got it does not want to work so in conclusion well we got memory sticks what wouldn't run at the speed that they're supposed to um it happens now and again um it's a bit like when you buy a processor some can overclock higher than others um it's all down to the quality of the actual memory uh what's in there and sometimes you get one or two sticks which aren't as good as others and that's usually why you get different speeds because they usually make them all a lot of time at the same time and then they test them and go right this one can do this speed this one can do this speed and then sell them at different prices but unfortunately in this case uh it didn't reach the speeds it was said to we could get it to post and run fine at 3 500 megahertz but 3600 just wouldn't have it even up in the sale rating to 20 um still caused issues and crashing we tried when we did manage to get it running um running cinebench and it would just crash out cinema bench or even blue screen the whole machine so we couldn't really do any proper testing on it because it wouldn't actually run at the speeds it should run at so otherwise we're basically underclocking it uh making it slower than it should actually be i'm hoping we've just got a bad uh basically pack of memory because a data memory is usually pretty good don't usually have any problems with it usually does what it says on the tin but unfortunately in this case on all our test machines it failed to do anything it said on the tin and just to clarify we have got other memory in from different manufacturers with the same specifications which work straight out of the box obviously when you enable xmp profile it picks up the speed and runs and works like it should where this failed to do that and even setting it manually it still failed\n"