[kaelinl]

My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me.

EXPO is akin to Intel's XMP. The RAM stick reports timings and other settings that it can handle and then the motherboard/user selects one to use. The profiles are needed because the official JEDEC standard for DDR doesn't provide a mechanism for running up to the frequencies that modern RAM uses; e.g. if you buy a DDR5 6000MHz kit, it'll only run at 4800MHz or thereabouts until you enable EXPO/XMP. RAM is really never expected to be run at the base frequency (without EXPO/XMP). If you buy a prebuilt, it'll have EXPO/XMP enabled, and if you build yourself you always should be enabling it. If you have a RAM kit that's somewhat recent and don't have it enabled, you've likely wasted money on the RAM.

Intel has attempted to claim that XMP was overclocking and violated their warranty but my understanding is that they quickly backed off.

[TacticalCoder]

> My reading of the statement (and understanding of other reporting on this subject) is that EXPO alone can trigger this issue. Calling EXPO overclocking feels somewhat disingenuous to me.

Totally. With DDR5-6000, it's even nastier: AMD repeatedly said that DDR5-6000 was the "sweet spot". I never overclocked any computer of mine but I did buy DDR5-6000 for my 7700X because AMD said it was the sweet spot. And I turned EXPO on so that it'd run at 6000, not 4800.

And now, after saying 6000 was the "sweet spot", they try to word things as if EXPO was somehow overclocking!?

[Ciantic]

I'm in same boat. I payed a premium for DDR5-6000 64GB for my 7950X, because AMD said it's the sweet spot... I didn't ever consider this "overclocking", I haven't ever been interested on overclocking, I just want stable machine.

Now I'm considering disabling EXPO, but I don't think it would work as 6000 anymore after that. I have used this machine for 4 months now, so I'd say it's pretty safe, but who knows, I haven't taxed the CPU with gaming yet.

[ilyt]

>Totally. With DDR5-6000, it's even nastier: AMD repeatedly said that DDR5-6000 was the "sweet spot".

And the specs on their own page say DDR5-5200 is the max memory speed, WTF

[Dalewyn]

>if you build yourself you always should be enabling it.

Absolutely not. This is such a terrible advice I would think you were trolling if I didn't assume better of you.

An end-user should not engage in any overclocking, XMP/EXPO included, without thorough knowledge and understanding of what they're getting into. You are literally driving your hardware above and beyond official, published specifications.

And no, marketing is not "official, published specifications".

[FrostKiwi]

> You are literally driving your hardware above and beyond official, published specifications.

That is not the case if we talk RAM. It is sold as 6000MHz, it is tested as 6000MHz and it is validated to run at 6000MHz. And there is a standard each developed by both Intel and AMD to allow RAM to ran at it's rated speed. It isn't just marketing. The problem is, that this standard entails going out of spec on the CPU side, where it does mean going beyond validated limits. But the consumer shouldn't have to dig to understand, that these standard designed to make your RAM run at it's rated speed technically means pushing limits.