3600 Hz RAM cant get past 3066 Hz

[kevman]

Currently running 7700K MSI z270 SLI Plus

I originally had 2 sticks of 8 Gb of Corsair 3200 CL16 ram in the system. I clicked on XMP and she was good to go. Have been running like this since I bought the system.

I wanted to upgrade to 32 Gb of Ram and picked up 2 sticks of 16Gb Crucial Ballistix 3600 CL16. Initially I clicked the XMP and system did not post.

Since then I have been mucking around with the frequencies and voltages and it will only post at 3066 and below. I have tried voltages up to 1.45V. I was able to add the XMP timings but just could not increase the frequency.

Is the Ram just a dud set or is this a symptom of my older board? According to crucial it is 100% compatible but this could just be at stock settings?

 

[kevman]

you are mixing rams which is not a good idea. you should be getting another set of the exact same ram as your original corsair rather than going for crucial ballistix. or ditch your old ram and go full set of matched 2x16GB.

you are lucky they can even post and run at 3066MHz

Sorry - yeah I have completely removed the old 16 Gb (2 sticks) and replaced with 32gb (2 sticks)

 

[kevman]

anyway, run some memtest at stock 2400MHz. And run them again at the postable 3066MHz and see what you get. If they can’t do XMP them there may we’ll be something dodgy with it. I got a set of ballistix that were duds on arrival. 3200Mhz returned lots of errors and at 2400MHz no errors. But crucial return policy is a bit crap. They need the ram to be returned and tested and then post out new ones. Best to deal with the retailer. In my case the forest gave me money to buy a new set from they again while waiting for my ram to be returned. So I got new ones next day.

Thanks will try this - I still have the old sticks so returning them is not such an issue.

Different memory chips and/or different amounts of RAM can make a difference to what is possible - 32GB has generally been harder to get higher frequencies stable than 16GB even with the same number of dimms populated.

I did wonder this. I am thinking about upgrading the platform soon. Is there anyway of knowing which boards have a decent mem controller. I noticed that newer boards can cope with overall more RAM e.g. 128 Gb. IS this an indicator of being better able to control the RAM?