Trial and error is often the best way forward here: test the different options until you find the one that works best for your hardware configuration. Once you’ve found this section, you should have access to a menu from which you can pick between various combinations of frequencies, timings, and memory voltages. If you are having trouble locating these options, check your motherboard documentation for more information. When in your BIOS, explore the menus until you find the section that allows you to tweak your memory profiles. (Not all motherboards offer these advanced memory profiles they are usually found on high-end motherboards designed for overclocking enthusiasts.) This is ideal for users who want more granular control than Intel® XMP offers, but aren’t necessarily interested in the minutiae of manually adjusting individual settings. If you are interested in making those changes yourself, some motherboards provide access to tools to tweak your memory settings.

While Intel® XMP is simple to use and optimizes performance per the manufacturer’s specifications, it may not provide the flexibility and level of customization some users might want. Intermediate Users: Advanced Memory Profiles This additional qualification and effort often results in a higher price, which is why low-latency, high-speed RAM tends to be more expensive.īoth are important, but in general, higher frequencies often outweigh timings when it comes to performance impact for the average user. Memory module manufacturers know this and carefully select memory chips for each stick, testing, and pairing memory modules that can reach the highest possible performance. Increased latency will reduce the performance and potentially eliminate the gains from a higher frequency, depending on the size of the frequency increase. This increases the time (latency) between operations, and helps to keep the transfer stable. To counter-balance stability challenges at high speeds, memory timings are often increased. Simply put, when a memory module operates at a high frequency, it is more difficult to keep it stable.

The two have to be considered together to determine the overall performance of RAM.Ĭompromises usually need to be made in order to raise one or lower the other. In an ideal world, RAM would have high frequencies and low timings.

Asrock timing configurator