8 ms·

> According to our sources and seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages being altered to unsafe higher levels. This can be

> According to our sources and seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages being altered to unsafe higher levels. This can be imposed from either the pre-programmed voltages used to support EXPO memory overclocking profiles or when a user manually adjusts the SoC voltages (a common practice to eke out a bit more memory overclocking headroom). Does that mean, as long as I don't overclock, my Ryzen7 CPU will most likely be a-ok?

metadat 4y ago
"Probably", but not guaranteed. This isn't a normal thing to have happen, even with overclocked chips. The temperature sensors used for thermal protection aren't usually the first thing to break.
- ilyt 4y ago
  It might not be temperature sensor itself but circuitry measuring it. Yeah sensor is "just a diode" but that needs amplifier and ADC to get to the rest of the system
caycep 4y ago
What I'm not sure of is DDR5 - it had seemed DDR5 offered more flexibility in voltage/speeds, i.e. the "stock" ddr5 speeds at 1.2V seemed conservative compared to 1.35 or 1.5V for DDR3 or DDR4. But if going about 1.2V or whatever voltage DDR5-6000 EXPO profiles are setting, also necessitates increasing SOC/CPU voltage...maybe it's better to hang back and just stick w/ DDR5-5200 or 5400 or something like that.
kimixa 4y ago
I think this is a bit of a stretch from tomshardware, as if you actually read the statement https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg it doesn't actually say what the problem is, or even that there is a problem. Just they released a new BIOS that has more limitations. And the other "evidence" of a photo of a damaged pin pad on a ryzen processor shows the damaged pins aren't related to the SoC rail mentioned in the article.
- JimBo72 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - kimixa 4y ago
    The only thing I can see in the article that supports that is: "Our sources also added further details about the nature of the chip failures — in some cases, excessive SoC voltages destroy the chips' thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms, completely disabling its only means of detecting and protecting itself from overheating" And "Our Sources" aren't motherboard vendor statements, none of the statements from motherboard vendors or AMD themselves support this theory, so we're relying on Tom's unnamed "sources" rather than any public evidence or statement. This is exactly what I dislike - the slow removal of the source and quality of evidence and information. It's Toms being bad too, as their statement "seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages" does not seem a good representation of the actual statement - the image of which I linked.
    - JimBo72 4y ago
      ASUS pointing out that they are defining new rules for vCore and SoC voltage to address these issues is in fact pointing to that as the issue. They aren't just "throwing that in there" because it is unrelated. If you need it to be even more direct, here is the statement from ASUS that says it is SoC voltage. https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 Here is the statement from Biostar that says SoC voltages are being limited: https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 You've admitted that you work for AMD, which would make a casual observer think that you are being biased in your comments. There is verifiable proof of the correlation with SoC voltage from the ODMs themselves.
      - JimBo72 4y ago
        [flagged]
pixl97 4y ago
I guess that depends on the nature of the failure and the fragility of the part. If you're staying inside the recommended voltage its likely the product will have a long life. For example look at the life curve of capacitors (and I'm not talking the diseased ones we had to deal with in the 2000s). The 'hotter' we run them the shorter their lifespan is. Now what can be difficult to figure out via testing is to figure out the MTBF when you have a hard cutoff point for failure that's not very much higher than standard operating specs. We could be failing at 100 hours at 1.4v, and 10,000 hours at 1.3v. Or it could last 100,000 hours at 1.3v.
kaelinl 4y ago
My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. EXPO is akin to Intel's XMP. The RAM stick reports timings and other settings that it can handle and then the motherboard/user selects one to use. The profiles are needed because the official JEDEC standard for DDR doesn't provide a mechanism for running up to the frequencies that modern RAM uses; e.g. if you buy a DDR5 6000MHz kit, it'll only run at 4800MHz or thereabouts until you enable EXPO/XMP. RAM is really never expected to be run at the base frequency (without EXPO/XMP). If you buy a prebuilt, it'll have EXPO/XMP enabled, and if you build yourself you always should be enabling it. If you have a RAM kit that's somewhat recent and don't have it enabled, you've likely wasted money on the RAM. Intel has attempted to claim that XMP was overclocking and violated their warranty but my understanding is that they quickly backed off.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. Totally. With DDR5-6000, it's even nastier: AMD repeatedly said that DDR5-6000 was the "sweet spot". I never overclocked any computer of mine but I did buy DDR5-6000 for my 7700X because AMD said it was the sweet spot. And I turned EXPO on so that it'd run at 6000, not 4800. And now, after saying 6000 was the "sweet spot", they try to word things as if EXPO was somehow overclocking!?
  - Ciantic 4y ago
    I'm in same boat. I payed a premium for DDR5-6000 64GB for my 7950X, because AMD said it's the sweet spot... I didn't ever consider this "overclocking", I haven't ever been interested on overclocking, I just want stable machine. Now I'm considering disabling EXPO, but I don't think it would work as 6000 anymore after that. I have used this machine for 4 months now, so I'd say it's pretty safe, but who knows, I haven't taxed the CPU with gaming yet.
    - 4y ago
zamalek 4y ago
In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. This effect is compounded with Ryzen because of Infinity Fabric, which is the interconnect between the chiplets in the CPU. IF is clocked to the same speed as your RAM - so at the 6000MT/s "sweet spot" the article mentions your IF and RAM bus are running at 3000MHz. Matching IF to RAM bus is so important that increasing the RAM bus clock above the IF clock will decrease performance (unless the RAM bus clock is a multiple of the IF clock). I haven't done the comparison on my 7950x, but on my 3950x running the IF at 1800MHz (RAM at 3600MT/s) resulted in a 10%-30% uplift in performance (depending on the workload). So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second.
- ilyt 4y ago
  >In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. Any source I could find says that EXPO does void warranty, as it is overclocking. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo (in footnotes section at the end of page) It might move RAM to it's manufacturer spec as you said but it does it by overclocking CPU > So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). Do you know any good benchmark (preferably Linux one) that would show those differences? I will be getting 7800X3D in few days so I want to test it for a bit. > What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. The core of the issue seems to be "just" overvolting so I'm guessing any manual overclock would still be fine. I have no need for it now (just puny 1070 to pair it with for now), but yeah, wait for new BIOS firmware seems to be best option. > Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second. Not exactly. The specified speed is only speed of the bus between memory and CPU, not the speed of memory chip itself. DDR4 3200 and DDR5 6400 have exact same internal speed (400MHz) and this is why there isn't much of latency improvement between generations (DDR5 does have some other tricks for latency). Also the 6400MHz is actual speed data is put on the bus, even if clock is half of that. It's pretty much entirely so the RAM chips don't have some insane number of pins but something manageable.
teirce 4y ago
Vendors are putting out updated BIOS that limit voltage going to the chips. Based on internet hearsay, even some of the non-OC chips were getting wrecked by stock BIOS overvolting enough. The real concern is with the X3D chips which are particularly sensitive to voltage and not particularly meant to be overclocked. I think you're fine as long as you flash an updated BIOS put out by your MB manufacturer.
a3w 4y ago
Derachtauer is a strange name. Is that guy called Kevin Achtauer,or what?
- zen_1 4y ago
  It's a stand in for "Der Bauer", and I think the guy's name is Roman
- anticensor 4y ago
  His real name is Roman Hartung.
paulmd 4y ago
If you enable Expo/XMP then AMD considers that an overclock (GD-106/GD-112). https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails That’s the root of the problem seemingly - going past the official spec (5200 MT/s for 2 sticks, 3600 MT/s for 4 sticks) requires additional voltage to the memory controller and it’s not uncommon for motherboards to automatically punch up the voltages when you turn on XMP or Expo. You requested the board to overclock after all, they’re just helping you get it stable without tinkering! It’s completely legal from the mobo vendor’s perspective to enable more voltage in “auto-OC” scenarios and they are in fact incentivized to do so by the possibility of returns and negative reviews/bad word of mouth. Customers will remember when “it didn’t work on Asus but I just enabled XMP on MSI and it worked fine”, even if that’s because MSI is punching up voltages. They will see that MSI scores 3% better in whatever benchmark. And AMD themselves in fact advertises benchmarks with Expo enabled, despite the fact that it officially voids the warranty. AMD and Intel (both) have gotten away with this for a long time, having their cake on heavily implying/suggesting it be enabled but technically voiding the warranty if you do (although it's quite unenforced unless you openly tell a warranty agent that you did it). I had a 9900K fail due to simply enabling XMP too, and I’ve seen many reports of early Zen1/Zen+/Zen2 with what seems likely to be IMC failures (they are getting to be "of the age" - 3-5 years with increased VSOC and the memory controllers are just clapped out). DDR4 controllers seem more delicate in general compared to DDR3, and DDR5 requires still higher voltages. It’s almost shocking to hear buildzoid recommend 1.3v VSOC as a “safe” daily driver. AM4 voltages were more like 0.8-1.1v. It also doesn’t help that the early AM5 IO die seems to be terrible. AMD's memory controllers always been worse than Intel even on AM4, but a lot of AM5 chips won’t even post with 4 sticks even at the pedestrian official spec of 3600 MT/s (intel is 3600 MT/s too but they actually work mostly reliably at it, it's a lottery with Zen4). Zen5 is supposed to feature an improved IO die and I wonder if the VSOC will be lower there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  I'll leave my little anecdata with Intel Alder Lake memory controller shenanigans since it's relevant. I built an i7 12700K system last year with 4x16GB DIMMs of DDR5-5600 RAM, for a total of 64GB RAM. Not being fully aware of the memory controller's limitations at that point (moral: read the datasheets!) I turned on XMP which obviously overclocked the RAM to 5600MHz. Note that at this point I was curious why the mobo had booted the system with RAM clocked to 4000MHz prior to my fiddling around with the BIOS. Afterwards, I had instability which manifested in random program and system crashes. Eventually I checked the RAM and confirmed that was the issue with memtest86 returning errors. I read up on the CPU's datasheet and learned that when supplied with 2 DIMMs per channel with 1 rank per DIMM, the memory controller downclocks to 4000MHz as specified. Incidentally, this answered why the mobo booted the system up with RAM clocked to 4000MHz at the beginning. I turned off XMP and backed off the overclock to 4800MHz with timings as applied by the mobo (they're just JEDEC profile timings), and that got me back to stability with subsequent tests in memtest86 returning no errors. The important things to takeaway here are that: * DDR5 memory controllers are still in their infancy compared to DDR4 and DDR3 controllers today, and can't yet deal with so much RAM at once. * Going beyond 1 DIMM per channel, 1 rank per DIMM means the memory controller will run slower than advertised, and this is according to specification. It is on us the end-users to do our homework, we can't forget we are using precision electronics. * With the memory controller running slower, overclocks are that much more taxing than XMP/EXPO and the marketing would imply. Simply turning on XMP/EXPO without thought is dangerous because those profiles do not account for a slower memory controller. * Overclocking is by its very definition running hardware above and beyond what they were designed and rated to operate at. Warranties will be voided, and hardware can be damaged or destroyed because they are operated out of specification. You have been warned, ignorance is not an excuse. * Between CPUs (and GPUs) today coming "over"clocked from the factory to perform at their peak and RAM speed having negligible real world performance implications for the vast majority of use cases, end-user overclocking is simply not worth the hassle unless you absolutely know what you're doing. * EFI/BIOS firmware nearly always come out of the box with safe defaults. If you don't know what you're doing, leaving them alone is perfectly fine. You will still have a very performant system. Overclocking is not for the faint of heart (nor the ignorant!).

metadat 4y ago

"Probably", but not guaranteed. This isn't a normal thing to have happen, even with overclocked chips. The temperature sensors used for thermal protection aren't usually the first thing to break.

ilyt 4y ago
It might not be temperature sensor itself but circuitry measuring it. Yeah sensor is "just a diode" but that needs amplifier and ADC to get to the rest of the system

caycep 4y ago

What I'm not sure of is DDR5 - it had seemed DDR5 offered more flexibility in voltage/speeds, i.e. the "stock" ddr5 speeds at 1.2V seemed conservative compared to 1.35 or 1.5V for DDR3 or DDR4. But if going about 1.2V or whatever voltage DDR5-6000 EXPO profiles are setting, also necessitates increasing SOC/CPU voltage...maybe it's better to hang back and just stick w/ DDR5-5200 or 5400 or something like that.

kimixa 4y ago

I think this is a bit of a stretch from tomshardware, as if you actually read the statement https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pM358j6.jpg it doesn't actually say what the problem is, or even that there is a problem. Just they released a new BIOS that has more limitations. And the other "evidence" of a photo of a damaged pin pad on a ryzen processor shows the damaged pins aren't related to the SoC rail mentioned in the article.

JimBo72 4y ago
[flagged]
- kimixa 4y ago
  The only thing I can see in the article that supports that is: "Our sources also added further details about the nature of the chip failures — in some cases, excessive SoC voltages destroy the chips' thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms, completely disabling its only means of detecting and protecting itself from overheating" And "Our Sources" aren't motherboard vendor statements, none of the statements from motherboard vendors or AMD themselves support this theory, so we're relying on Tom's unnamed "sources" rather than any public evidence or statement. This is exactly what I dislike - the slow removal of the source and quality of evidence and information. It's Toms being bad too, as their statement "seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages" does not seem a good representation of the actual statement - the image of which I linked.
  - JimBo72 4y ago
    ASUS pointing out that they are defining new rules for vCore and SoC voltage to address these issues is in fact pointing to that as the issue. They aren't just "throwing that in there" because it is unrelated. If you need it to be even more direct, here is the statement from ASUS that says it is SoC voltage. https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 https://twitter.com/ASUSTechMKTJJ/status/1650920434404331520 Here is the statement from Biostar that says SoC voltages are being limited: https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/news/news.php?S_ID=559 You've admitted that you work for AMD, which would make a casual observer think that you are being biased in your comments. There is verifiable proof of the correlation with SoC voltage from the ODMs themselves.
    - JimBo72 4y ago
      [flagged]

pixl97 4y ago

I guess that depends on the nature of the failure and the fragility of the part. If you're staying inside the recommended voltage its likely the product will have a long life. For example look at the life curve of capacitors (and I'm not talking the diseased ones we had to deal with in the 2000s). The 'hotter' we run them the shorter their lifespan is. Now what can be difficult to figure out via testing is to figure out the MTBF when you have a hard cutoff point for failure that's not very much higher than standard operating specs. We could be failing at 100 hours at 1.4v, and 10,000 hours at 1.3v. Or it could last 100,000 hours at 1.3v.

kaelinl 4y ago

My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. EXPO is akin to Intel's XMP. The RAM stick reports timings and other settings that it can handle and then the motherboard/user selects one to use. The profiles are needed because the official JEDEC standard for DDR doesn't provide a mechanism for running up to the frequencies that modern RAM uses; e.g. if you buy a DDR5 6000MHz kit, it'll only run at 4800MHz or thereabouts until you enable EXPO/XMP. RAM is really never expected to be run at the base frequency (without EXPO/XMP). If you buy a prebuilt, it'll have EXPO/XMP enabled, and if you build yourself you always should be enabling it. If you have a RAM kit that's somewhat recent and don't have it enabled, you've likely wasted money on the RAM. Intel has attempted to claim that XMP was overclocking and violated their warranty but my understanding is that they quickly backed off.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me. Totally. With DDR5-6000, it's even nastier: AMD repeatedly said that DDR5-6000 was the "sweet spot". I never overclocked any computer of mine but I did buy DDR5-6000 for my 7700X because AMD said it was the sweet spot. And I turned EXPO on so that it'd run at 6000, not 4800. And now, after saying 6000 was the "sweet spot", they try to word things as if EXPO was somehow overclocking!?
- Ciantic 4y ago
  I'm in same boat. I payed a premium for DDR5-6000 64GB for my 7950X, because AMD said it's the sweet spot... I didn't ever consider this "overclocking", I haven't ever been interested on overclocking, I just want stable machine. Now I'm considering disabling EXPO, but I don't think it would work as 6000 anymore after that. I have used this machine for 4 months now, so I'd say it's pretty safe, but who knows, I haven't taxed the CPU with gaming yet.
  - 4y ago

zamalek 4y ago

In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. This effect is compounded with Ryzen because of Infinity Fabric, which is the interconnect between the chiplets in the CPU. IF is clocked to the same speed as your RAM - so at the 6000MT/s "sweet spot" the article mentions your IF and RAM bus are running at 3000MHz. Matching IF to RAM bus is so important that increasing the RAM bus clock above the IF clock will decrease performance (unless the RAM bus clock is a multiple of the IF clock). I haven't done the comparison on my 7950x, but on my 3950x running the IF at 1800MHz (RAM at 3600MT/s) resulted in a 10%-30% uplift in performance (depending on the workload). So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second.

ilyt 4y ago
>In general, you should be running the EXPO profile: this "upclocks" your RAM. I use the term "upclock" instead of overclock because you aren't pushing your RAM past its manufacturer's limit, you are pushing it to that limit. The JEDEC profile (the opposite of EXPO) is extremely conservative and can significantly affect performance. Any source I could find says that EXPO does void warranty, as it is overclocking. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/expo (in footnotes section at the end of page) It might move RAM to it's manufacturer spec as you said but it does it by overclocking CPU > So with Ryzen, if should consider purchasing RAM that is matched to the IF clock. For Ryzen 7 that is 6000MT/s. If you purchased RAM above that, you should definitely decrease the clock to match IF (you can tighten RAM timing to take advantage of the more expensive chips that you purchased, if you have the patience to). Do you know any good benchmark (preferably Linux one) that would show those differences? I will be getting 7800X3D in few days so I want to test it for a bit. > What am I doing? I am going to disable EXPO, but I will definitely be re-enabling once this has been resolved. The core of the issue seems to be "just" overvolting so I'm guessing any manual overclock would still be fine. I have no need for it now (just puny 1070 to pair it with for now), but yeah, wait for new BIOS firmware seems to be best option. > Aside: What is MT/s vs MHz? DDR stands for "double data rate", meaning the MHz that everyone uses to describe the speed of RAM is a misnomer. "6000MHz" RAM actually runs at 3000MHz (but does two transfers per clock cycle). So: Mega-Transfers per Second. Not exactly. The specified speed is only speed of the bus between memory and CPU, not the speed of memory chip itself. DDR4 3200 and DDR5 6400 have exact same internal speed (400MHz) and this is why there isn't much of latency improvement between generations (DDR5 does have some other tricks for latency). Also the 6400MHz is actual speed data is put on the bus, even if clock is half of that. It's pretty much entirely so the RAM chips don't have some insane number of pins but something manageable.

teirce 4y ago

Vendors are putting out updated BIOS that limit voltage going to the chips. Based on internet hearsay, even some of the non-OC chips were getting wrecked by stock BIOS overvolting enough. The real concern is with the X3D chips which are particularly sensitive to voltage and not particularly meant to be overclocked. I think you're fine as long as you flash an updated BIOS put out by your MB manufacturer.

a3w 4y ago

Derachtauer is a strange name. Is that guy called Kevin Achtauer,or what?

zen_1 4y ago
It's a stand in for "Der Bauer", and I think the guy's name is Roman
anticensor 4y ago
His real name is Roman Hartung.

paulmd 4y ago

If you enable Expo/XMP then AMD considers that an overclock (GD-106/GD-112). https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/gamingdetails That’s the root of the problem seemingly - going past the official spec (5200 MT/s for 2 sticks, 3600 MT/s for 4 sticks) requires additional voltage to the memory controller and it’s not uncommon for motherboards to automatically punch up the voltages when you turn on XMP or Expo. You requested the board to overclock after all, they’re just helping you get it stable without tinkering! It’s completely legal from the mobo vendor’s perspective to enable more voltage in “auto-OC” scenarios and they are in fact incentivized to do so by the possibility of returns and negative reviews/bad word of mouth. Customers will remember when “it didn’t work on Asus but I just enabled XMP on MSI and it worked fine”, even if that’s because MSI is punching up voltages. They will see that MSI scores 3% better in whatever benchmark. And AMD themselves in fact advertises benchmarks with Expo enabled, despite the fact that it officially voids the warranty. AMD and Intel (both) have gotten away with this for a long time, having their cake on heavily implying/suggesting it be enabled but technically voiding the warranty if you do (although it's quite unenforced unless you openly tell a warranty agent that you did it). I had a 9900K fail due to simply enabling XMP too, and I’ve seen many reports of early Zen1/Zen+/Zen2 with what seems likely to be IMC failures (they are getting to be "of the age" - 3-5 years with increased VSOC and the memory controllers are just clapped out). DDR4 controllers seem more delicate in general compared to DDR3, and DDR5 requires still higher voltages. It’s almost shocking to hear buildzoid recommend 1.3v VSOC as a “safe” daily driver. AM4 voltages were more like 0.8-1.1v. It also doesn’t help that the early AM5 IO die seems to be terrible. AMD's memory controllers always been worse than Intel even on AM4, but a lot of AM5 chips won’t even post with 4 sticks even at the pedestrian official spec of 3600 MT/s (intel is 3600 MT/s too but they actually work mostly reliably at it, it's a lottery with Zen4). Zen5 is supposed to feature an improved IO die and I wonder if the VSOC will be lower there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo

Dalewyn 4y ago
I'll leave my little anecdata with Intel Alder Lake memory controller shenanigans since it's relevant. I built an i7 12700K system last year with 4x16GB DIMMs of DDR5-5600 RAM, for a total of 64GB RAM. Not being fully aware of the memory controller's limitations at that point (moral: read the datasheets!) I turned on XMP which obviously overclocked the RAM to 5600MHz. Note that at this point I was curious why the mobo had booted the system with RAM clocked to 4000MHz prior to my fiddling around with the BIOS. Afterwards, I had instability which manifested in random program and system crashes. Eventually I checked the RAM and confirmed that was the issue with memtest86 returning errors. I read up on the CPU's datasheet and learned that when supplied with 2 DIMMs per channel with 1 rank per DIMM, the memory controller downclocks to 4000MHz as specified. Incidentally, this answered why the mobo booted the system up with RAM clocked to 4000MHz at the beginning. I turned off XMP and backed off the overclock to 4800MHz with timings as applied by the mobo (they're just JEDEC profile timings), and that got me back to stability with subsequent tests in memtest86 returning no errors. The important things to takeaway here are that: * DDR5 memory controllers are still in their infancy compared to DDR4 and DDR3 controllers today, and can't yet deal with so much RAM at once. * Going beyond 1 DIMM per channel, 1 rank per DIMM means the memory controller will run slower than advertised, and this is according to specification. It is on us the end-users to do our homework, we can't forget we are using precision electronics. * With the memory controller running slower, overclocks are that much more taxing than XMP/EXPO and the marketing would imply. Simply turning on XMP/EXPO without thought is dangerous because those profiles do not account for a slower memory controller. * Overclocking is by its very definition running hardware above and beyond what they were designed and rated to operate at. Warranties will be voided, and hardware can be damaged or destroyed because they are operated out of specification. You have been warned, ignorance is not an excuse. * Between CPUs (and GPUs) today coming "over"clocked from the factory to perform at their peak and RAM speed having negligible real world performance implications for the vast majority of use cases, end-user overclocking is simply not worth the hassle unless you absolutely know what you're doing. * EFI/BIOS firmware nearly always come out of the box with safe defaults. If you don't know what you're doing, leaving them alone is perfectly fine. You will still have a very performant system. Overclocking is not for the faint of heart (nor the ignorant!).