Hi everyone! Noob question here. I’m planning to purchase an i7-14700k and a mobo that says it accommodates RAM speeds at 7000mhz. With that said, I’ve read comments saying that they couldn’t get good stability in 14th gen over 6600Mhz. I’m not overclocking and don’t plan to. My question is, are these people only getting bad stability because they are overclocking, or do I need to make sure my RAM is 6600 or 6400 or lower? In other words, do stock speeds ever risk reducing stability? I’m new to any of that.
Side question, if my board says 7000Mhz, can I run less than that for RAM without issue or must it match?
Anything over 5600 CL46 (the officially supported frequency for the 14700K) is technically an overclock. Though most CPUs will do 6000 and 6400 just fine.
Does that board happen to be the msi pro z790-P? If so you’re fine the people who are getting ram instability at those frequencies im 1000% sure are from their boards. More proof of this was my 13600k on a z690 board. At first it could only do 6200, than I updated the bios and suddenly 6400 was stable, a few months later my board came out with another new update, now 6600 worked and now it’s stable at 6666mhz. If it was the cpus memory controller as the problem, new bios updates wouldn’t help at all but they did because its the board you cheaped out on thats tbe issue. That’s why you go MSI when doing so because they have so much better minimum memory and vrm quality unlike the atrocious bottom tier z690/z790 boards that gigabyte and especially asus offer. They also will essentially flat out lie in that supported ram speed spec u referenced
Up to 6400cl32 xmp imo should work flawlessly in 99,9% of cases. 6600-7200 xmp will work most the time fine assuming you are not limited by motherboard. 7600 and higher, it is very likely xmp wont work and will need to tune voltages manually.
Setting the XMP profile is actually overclocking and, depending on the motherboard and Cpu, you may or may not attain that speed.
Even if you’re not overclocking, unstable RAM can cause lots of issues.
I don’t have any personal experience with ddr5 yet but at least on ddr4 a lot of XMP profiles had stability issues that were fixed just with manual tuning, but it’s different if your CPU doesn’t officially support it, too.