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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

XMP (and AMD's EXPO) is an overclock, you should not and can not expect stability out of the box where overclocks are concerned. This is regardless whatever the RAM vendor might tell you; an overclock is an overclock, it is literally running hardware out of specification.

Both Intel and AMD publish their memory controller specs and you should thoroughly understand them if you do want to overclock (read: use XMP/EXPO), anything that goes above the specs is not guaranteed to work.

Incidentally, for all the flak the motherboard vendors rightfully got with their out of the box overclocking defaults, their default configuration for RAM is in fact to stick to Intel/AMD specifications like superglue.

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I don't think it is as cut and dried as "you should not and can not expect stability out of the box". If it doesn't overclock, you RMA it, if the new one doesn't overclock either, either you are bad at overclocking or you got really unlucky in the silicon lottery. It just doesn't fit the facts to say that you shouldn't expect 5400 Mhz ram to work at 5400 Mhz, even if Intel says the spec is 4800 or whatever. Now 7200 Mhz, that is pushing it and is a lot more like snake oil.

>If it doesn't overclock, you RMA it

Overclocks are explicitly not covered by warranty.

Yes, Intel and AMD and mobo vendors all say overclocks "may" void warranty and in general they have honored warranties for overclocked hardware, but the official and legal position is that overclocking is not covered by warranty.

>It just doesn't fit the facts to say that you shouldn't expect 5400 Mhz ram to work at 5400 Mhz

You can certainly try RMAing the RAM with the RAM vendor since they sold it for whatever frequency they marketed it at. But as far as Intel and the mobo vendor would be concerned, an overclock is beyond the purview of their warranties.

It would certainly be interesting to see if Intel can get sued for their "don't ask, don't tell" policy, but practically I view warranties as a joke anyway. What I meant was really stuff like Amazon's 30-day return policy. Those are no questions asked and 30 days is plenty of time to see if overclocking works.

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