You can optimize your RAM by tweaking a few settings in your BIOS. By doing this, you are removing the memory speed cap set by the manufacturer. In this article, we will show you how to overclock your PC RAM, with its benefits and drawbacks.

How to Overclock Your PC RAM

Before you begin overclocking your RAM, there are a few things you need to know. RAM overclocking might be a little more complicated than overclocking a GPU or CPU. On the plus side, it doesn’t generate as much heat as GPU or CPU overclocking.

DDR4 is the norm with RAMs these days. The speed is around 2133MHz or 2400MHz, coming from a manufacturer. Every program needs to access RAM to run on your PC.

RAMs use Serial Presence Detect to talk with the computer. It consists of a set of operating frequencies and timings. It is available on almost all the DDR4 RAM sticks and is known as the JEDEC specification. However, manufacturers like Intel have some tricks up their sleeves to cheat this system. They use a different profile called XMP.

XMP stands for eXtreme Memory Profile. As a result, Intel offers the ability to overclock RAM straight out of the factory. Still, it isn’t the best overclocking you can get out of that RAM. You can push the boundaries to further overclock it from the manufacturer’s capped frequency.

Some Useful Tools for Overclocking RAM

There are several tools to assess your RAM’s information. Here is a list of three tools that let you get information regarding your RAM before overclocking.

CPU-Z: CPU-Z is a free tool to assess and take notes of your DRAM before overclocking. If you head over to the Memory tab of CPU-Z, you can find all the information there. Additionally, there are XMP settings that your BIOS uses, located under the SPD tab. Memtest86+: This is more of a testing tool used for stress testing on your PC. It comes with a wide variety of options to run stress tests. XMP (eXtreme Memory Profiles): As mentioned above, XMP is an additional profile used by Intel to validate overclocking settings. Using XMP can allow the firmware to configure DRAM voltages and latencies automatically.

NOTE: You can always clear or reset your RAM settings if things don’t work for you. If your PC boots up, yet is unstable, you can revert to previous settings in the BIOS. If the PC doesn’t boot up at all after a second restart, try to clear the CMOS on your motherboard to reset BIOS settings to default. If you don’t know how to do that, consider checking your motherboard’s manual.

There are two methods to overclock your CPU: using XMP and manually overclocking.

1. Using XMP to Overclock RAM

Intel gives you the option to overclock using the XMP profile. To overclock your PC RAM using the XMP method, follow these steps:

Install and open CPU-Z on your PC. Note down the DRAM frequency and timings along with timing tables from the SPD tab. Restart your PC and enter BIOS mode. Once entered into BIOS, head over to the AI Tweaker / Extreme Tweaker / D. O. C. P. option, depending on your motherboard. Choose the right XMP profile that matches the advertised specifications of your RAM. After making the necessary changes in the BIOS, save changes and restart your PC. Once the PC restarts, perform stress tests to check its stability. If things don’t work out well, make the necessary changes in BIOS and stress-test again.

If the system is stable, then you have achieved overclocking of your RAM using XMP.

2. Using Manual Settings to Overclock RAM

Following the above steps will give you a good idea of where the system is stable. You might want to write down the right timings, frequencies, and speeds. In this method, we will boost the voltage of the RAM, leading to better RAM performance.

If you want to take advantage of the manual settings to overclock your RAM, follow these steps:

Reboot your system into the BIOS and navigate to AI Tweaker or equivalent settings of your BIOS, as mentioned above. Instead of selecting an XMP profile, select the Manual settings. This will unlock additional settings for you. You should slowly start increasing the DRAM voltage in 0. 015V increments. Similarly, increase the CPU VCCIO and CPU System Agent voltages in 0. 05V increments. NOTE: Make sure you don’t overdo them; it may cause your components to fail. For DRAM timings, check the timings that you noted down while performing XMP overclocking. After making the necessary changes in the BIOS, save changes and restart your PC. Once the PC restarts, perform stress tests to check its stability.

If things don’t work out well, make the necessary changes in BIOS and stress-test again. In the event that your system is stable, then you have overclocked your RAM successfully.

Should You Overclock Your RAM?

RAM is necessary for any system. Every program on your PC uses a certain amount of RAM to boot up faster and run in the background. And that’s where the actual use case of faster RAM becomes apparent. It’s not always the CPU and GPU that improve your PC’s performance: it’s also your PC’s RAM speed that results in better performance.

You might not see the results as a day-to-day user, but if you are the one whose work relies highly on RAM, then overclocking is a good option for you. Other than those circumstances, if you are a gamer, you’ll see the actual effect of an overclocked RAM. The frame rate of your games increases drastically and might improve your gameplay.

Is Overclocking RAM Bad for Your PC?

Technically, overclocking RAM isn’t bad for your PC if you are doing it to the RAM’s actual limits. If you overclock the GPU or CPU, you must worry about noise and the cooler’s capacity to handle such clock speeds. However, that’s not the case with overclocking RAM.

Overclocking a RAM, even at wrong frequencies, will give you an error at most. Later, you will need to tweak the frequencies or voltages to stabilize the RAM. There’s no issue of overheating, so you need not worry about that.

But doing this on a laptop is a bit risky. You might want to check for the CMOS reset option, so that you can reset your BIOS settings if something goes wrong.

Overclocking PC RAM: Success

So that’s how you can overclock your PC’s RAM. But always remember that even though it’s risk-free, you must have a backup RAM for if something goes wrong at any point. We recommend you to overclock your RAM only if your work involves a lot of RAM usage, like video/graphics editing, gaming, etc.

The method for overclocking RAM is different from one manufacturer to another. So do an ample amount of research before hopping onto overclocking your PC’s RAM. If you are afraid to overclock your RAM, you can always get an overclocked RAM from any online store.