Memory overclocking:
This is where I have high hopes for this new BIOS in order to take full advantage of the A-Die memory overclocking with my excellent Teamgroup Delta RGB 7200 MT/s CL34 memory kit. The idea is to choose the kit that we think has the best overclocking potential. And you will see, we were not wrong.
Choosing your DDR5 kit based on memory chips:
As it was already the case for DDR4, if you want to clock your memory, some brands will have a better potential. Currently, the kits announced by the different brands benefit either from Micron chips or Hynix chips or Samsung chips. Currently, the Hynix A-Die chips are the best at this game.
The “key” voltages of the DDR5 :
For memory overclocking, there are 5 key voltages. These are the voltages that will have an impact on the overclocking and therefore on the frequency rise or the tightening of the timings. These are the VSA, the CPU VDDQ, the CPU VDD2 and on the memory side, the VDD and VDDQ. Here is where these voltages are located in the BIOS.
Let’s go for the overclocking of this DDR5 :
We must admit that we were impatient to start, we went directly to a profile of 8000 MT/s that we knew was stable where we encoded all the timings and all the voltages. We save the profile, reboot the motherboard and here we are already in the OS. It took us 10 minutes in total. A small AIDA64 benchmark and a Geekbench 3 that goes very easily to 1.55 volts (VDD/VDDQ).
Let’s try with the same settings and tensions the 8200 MT/s. And again, no problem, it boots without problem and both benchmarks are perfectly stable.
Well, for 8400 MT/s it still doesn’t pass and this is quite logical. Even if we increase the voltages, it will be necessary to relax the timings . So we kept the profile at 8200 MT/s, increased the voltages to 1.60 volt and lowered the tRAS to 32. Once in the OS, we increased the frequency of the BCLK which will increase the memory frequency. We are now at 8444 MT/s.
So this DDR5 overclocking? We were not disappointed to say the least. EVGA has finally done the job on this BIOS 2.05 by erasing the problems encountered with the previous BIOS. We were able to reach a frequency of 8444 MHz in aircooling with timings of 34-45-45-30. Until a few weeks ago, we would never have imagined that we could reach these frequencies in aircooling.
The other good news is that the voltages were “only” 1.6 volts. It is a frequency used for bencher and not for a H24 use. But you should know that several brands will soon offer kits with an XMP at 8000 MT/s. We could probably make a stable profile at 8000 MT/s by relaxing the timings but that was not the objective here. On the Geekbench 3.4.4 benchmark we were able to reach a memory score of 16272 points, a score that was unimaginable for us only a few weeks ago. We are not done with our tests yet and we hope to reach 8600 MT/s.
