How to activate xmp profile of your ram memory from bios

Many of you have asked me to make a quick guide on how to activate the XMP profile of the PC's RAM memory from the BIOS and thus make the most of it. For example, there are memories that come tested or tested by the manufacturers at 3200 MHz, but when installing it on our computer it only recognizes it at 2133 MHz (in the case of DDR4 memory) or at 1333 MHz with DDR3 DIMM memory.

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The importance of having the XMP profile active

If you are one of those people who is never satisfied with the characteristics and specifications of a computer and you have decided to build one that suits your needs or you only bought a RAM, but it does not run according to its characteristics, we will help you to that you can enable XMP instead of setting times.

It is normal for this memory to run below its characteristics, that is, to run slower, this is because it is designed to run at standard speeds. But if you want your memory to give the maximum you must configure XMP to reach the maximum limit.

Why is my RAM memory not working to the limit?

There is an engineering council, JEDEC, that decides the memory speed limits. Even if you acquire a memory that exceeds these established limits, it will automatically run within the limits.

The advantage is that you can choose a different way than the traditional one, which is to enter the BIOS and manually configure the times one by one. Your memory has " Extreme Memory Profiles ", XMP, which is a small amount of storage.

Your BIOS will be able to read the profiles and make the configuration automatically according to the manufacturer of the memory. If you want to first check the times you can do it within Windows.

The first thing you should do is download the CPU-Z executable by clicking on the memory tab and the memory synchronizations that are already configured to run will appear.

The time comparison you see there is the speed at which they work. If you armed your computer and did not modify the BIOS… it is very likely that these times do not go according to what you expect, right? We bring you the following solution:

Enable Intel XMP and enjoy your RAM to the fullest

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We have used as a reference an Asus Maximus IX Formula motherboard and Corsair DDR4 Platinum memories that we analyzed a long time ago. Without further ado, we leave you with the steps to follow:

In order to enable XMP you have to enter the BIOS of your computer. You need to restart your computer and then you are going to press the correct key when it starts the boot process, usually it is "Del / Del / Delete", "Esc" or "F2".

Normally the key to press to enter your BIOS appears on the screen. Notice ?

Now you are going to look in the BIOS for the option you have on behalf of XMP. In our case we have used the Asus BIOS (the names in the other manufacturers are very similar). We go to the " Extreme Tweaker " area and click on " Ai Overclock Tuner " and activate the XMP option.

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If we look at the XMP option we see that a single profile appears: DDR4-3200 16-18-18-36 at 1.35V. In other RAM modules, it allows us to choose two profiles: default and the overclocked one tested . In this case we leave the DDR4 at 3200 MHz active.

Now it would be as simple as going to save and restart. But… let's check if the voltage of the RAM memory is well marked.

It is indeed correct. It is possible that when you are playing or pass some test you fail… So what do I do? XMP profile not working? All components oscillate the voltage up or down (albeit mild), this event is called VDROOP. We fix it by applying one more voltage point to the memories (pressing the + key) and all our problems will be over. Remaining on Asus motherboards like this:

Now go back to the output options of your BIOS to confirm the change of your times, restart your computer and you're done. If you want you can check in CPU-Z that the 3200 MHz is listed (It will come out in this case about 1800 MHz )

Is it worth activating the XMP profile? Our opinion

Before finishing we want to invite you to read an article that we informed you about the scaling of DDR4 memories to 2133 MHz up to 4000 MHz in benchmarks and games. As we see the improvement is not as spectacular as we expected but hey… if we can scratch 2 FPS in all the games or take advantage of the speed in performance tasks, why don't we do it? For something we have good memories.

Now we ask you , what did you think of the tutorial on how to activate the XMP profile on your computer? Did you already have it activated on your motherboard? We are waiting your comments.