A Christmas RAM upgrade story with plot twists

[earthdog]

I was considering upgrading my 13700K to a 14700K but after consideration i think the price does not worth the gains, so i opted for upgrading my RAM from 32GB to 64GB in preparation for the day when MSFS2024 will be as ready as i need it to be.

My rig composition back on Monday was:

i7-1300k @ 55Ghz

32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6400 RAM

RTX 4070 Ti SUPER

I was happy to find extra 2 x 16GB RAM sticks of exactly the same type so i run off to get them. Adding them to the board was a happy moment with me smiling. Boot up the machine the memory was found and at that moment i remembered that i need also to update the BIOS to include all the microcode corrections that were rolled out with the known Intel issue with the 13th and 14th gen CPUs.

So i saved my BIOS settings and updated the BIOS to the latest.... and then i felt the new kid on the block. Why?

Because i realized how much things have changed in regards to overclocking methods. My settings from the old BIOS version were not stable at all. Basically i was around 1.31 vcore @ 55Ghz. 

After reading pages and pages i got to the main article that got me starting with a different method of overclocking by properly undervolting (mind the word properly). A second post dealing with the same logic is this one.

I said to myself: "That's it old man , you have this",  and i started following the guide and hell broke loose. Nothing was stable even at defaults or near defaults. Started to think like a true Simmer and was trying to correlate was caused the instability. Checked also the fever of the dog cause you know, You will never know what affected your sim, it can be everything.

Jokes aside i learned something new on Monday. I learned that 4 sticks of RAM will almost never work with XMP. It is a common knowledge which i had heard about but i never had 4 sticks of RAM (at least in my recent builds), in order to be affected.

So disabled XMP and the system was stable enough. Did i mention that i had already returned my 2 sticks as problematic and got another 2 of the same? I got back to the store again telling them the fact that i cant have 4 sticks and get XMP to work. They were very kind to take them back and give me 2x32 GB sticks. I installed them and got XMP to work.

During all this time i also created a topic in MSI forums which i got the help from a couple of experienced guys out there and got my system to be stable as of yesterday!!!

So, if anyone is on the same boat take a look at the links above to get you started and not loose 2 days like me without a reason.

For anyone interested my stable configuration for my build (Cinebench score is around 31000) is the following: