I want to upgrade ROG Strix G18 (2023) RAM to 5600mhz in BIOS

[NecipReis]

I want Asus officials to support this issue. I want to upgrade ROG Strix G18 (2023) RAM to 5600 mhz. Please do a bios update for it. Other brands allow up to 6000 MHz.

[24JGM]

Hi folks,

I just purchased a G18, and if all is well when I receive it, my first order of business will be an SSD and RAM upgrade. I just wanted to make sure my reading of the thread is correct that with the latest BIOS update, I should be able to run this at 5600?

Thanks

[Yokehoo]

Hi 24JGM,

in my suggestion you should wait until you receive your laptop and updated it to BIOS 312. I'm not pretty sure, but I think there might be a little chance that the original Samsung modules can run at 5600MT/s from the start ? If not, you still can upgrade your RAM if it doesn't later. As you can see here, some users are using 5600 Samsung kits in 16GB or 32GB and they're running now at 5600MT/s after updating to ver 312, meanwhile Kogashjne is reporting his 64GB kit didn't get the maximum speed boost of 5200MT/s at this time so far and his modules still working at 4800MT/s. From my site I only can tell you that my 64GB kit from Kingston has get the speed boost up to 5200MT/s ( which is correct for double sided modules ) within 312 and therefore I think the 16GB and 32GB kits will also get the full boost to 5600MT/s with also slightly faster timings based on the SK Hynix chips ( CAS 40 ) then the Samsung chips ( CAS 46 ). As I read the latency timings from the Crucial Website correctly I think they're using Samsung chips ( CAS 46 ) and therefore I would expect, that the 16GB and 32GB kits will run at 5600MT/s. If there's not a huge price difference in your region, I personally would prefer the Kingston kits in case of the lower timings ( CAS 40 ) but that depends on you.

Hopefully I could answer your question

[LastingOption]

FWIW, I have the Strix Scar 15 (2022) G533ZX-XS96.  I spent the better part of last night trying to get the Mushkin Redline 2x48GB DDR5-5600 kit to work.  TLDR; it did not.  Funny thing is, after reading this thread and some previous ones, I am growing increasingly frustrated with Asus' lack of transparency regarding BIOS revisions and technical support.

Just one quick note, I know that the 12th gen Alder Lake spec will not support past DDR5-4800 without XMP, and I also know that Asus refuses to enable XMP in their laptop BIOS for probably the same reason they block undervolting on the 12900h (or even the HX series for that matter) - so that you have to upgrade your $3,500 USD, one-year-old laptop to a 13th gen product with (as I am reading through these threads) just the same amount of bugs and performance issues as mine had a year ago.

That's a real shame, since by me even writing this post (and you folks even reading it), we are all either enthusiasts in our own rite or we have come here to find solutions to the myriad performance, compatibility, and transparency problems Asus has seen fit to levy upon us.

There is no QVL for my laptop (can't speak to yours), there is no support or revision history for any of the BIOS updates, and there is no way of knowing what you are actually installing onto your system.  I knew from jump that this RAM kit, even if it did work, would never clock at 5600 in my laptop, but I also knew that the secondary JEDEC profile should be able to be read if you can "trick" your Scar into retraining the RAM.

Prior to purchasing this kit, I did indeed confirm directly with Mushkin's US-based and extremely informative and intelligent tech support that this indeed was the case.  ANY 12th gen and higher Intel chip supports 24 and 48 GB sticks - this is a fact.  ANY 12th gen and higher Intel chip supports DDR5-4800 at a minimum - this is a fact.  ANY RAM modules sold in the US are required to have the JEDEC profiles installed alongside any XMP or nonstandard profiles - this is a fact.  I shouldn't have to read pages deep in a forum thread talking about the closest thing to my laptop and similar issues just to find out what memory chips are supported - this is a fact.

I'll stop here as my other issues, such as greyed out GPU base and memory offset sliders in manual mode after latest "update," failure of Dolby Atmos despite never actually doing a clean install because I didn't want to lose my licenses after all the other posts about this topic, power limit throttling after the latest "update" before my CPU and GPU can even heat up (a solid 9-11 degrees south of my personal silicon's prior abilities and actual thermal limits (no, that's not a good thing in this case, as my performance degraded commensurate with this)), and others, are outside the scope of this thread.

Thanks ASUS.

Also, this is the kit I purchased:
Mushkin Redline 96GB (2x48GB) DDR5 5600 MHz SODIMM Laptop RAM MRA5S560LKKD48GX2

Mushkin has a 4800 and 5200 kit at the same capacity.  I may try the 4800 kit if for no other reason than to prove it will work and/or see if the speed of this kit is indeed the only limiting factor and that Asus BIOS is not capable of reading a secondary SPD.

[Flo]

I understand your frustration, but from what I can see XMP is supported on G16, G18, SCAR with latest BIOS.

ASUS is telling us they cannot provide a RAM QVL for laptops, which is very strange as a much smaller company than ASUS, named "XMG" has absolutely no trouble doing it!

Here's my G16, as you can see XMP profile is activated:

[LastingOption]

That's great; thanks for sharing... I did not know the 2023 models supported XMP.  I recently listened to a clip or read an article in which the director of product (I think) at XMG was talking about this and about the undervolting issue, and that they worked directly with Intel to make sure they could support their customers and that it was technically not possible for a mis- or poorly configured undervolt to actually permanently damage any equipment.  In any case, thanks for showing me this; at least there's hope.

[Yokehoo]

Hi LastingOption,

I'm not sure what you're talking about. If I read the documentation of the Intel 12th gen CPU's on this page https://cdrdv2.intel.com/v1/dl/getContent/655258 your modules should run at 4800MT/s 🤔 which is maximum supported by Intel for the 12th gen CPU.

At least, there is still no support of XMP profiles in the 2023 or 13th gen models !!! On CPU-Z you can only see a few of the JEDEC standard profiles as you can see in the encounter numbers JEDEC#8 JEDEC#9 JEDEC#10 profiles in the screenshot of Flo... XMP ist NOT activated and can't be activated in BIOS either. If you're lucky, one of your JEDEC profiles is loaded correctly and will support faster timings and speeds stored in one of the JEDEC profiles and will be activated on memory training from the first start of your system. If XMP will be enabled in the future, we'll hopefully get the full 5600MT/s for our double sided modules stored in the XMP profile for the 13th gen CPUs BUT 12th gen will never support this speed while there's a cap of 4800MT/s on the internal memory controler which only can be overwritten by the XMP profile. Since then, we've to work with the offical supported 5200MT/s for the double sided modules in JEDEC standard from Intel for the 13th gen CPUs and 4800MT/s for the 12th gen CPUs.

While you're now talking on your 12th gen Alder Lake CPU in your SCAR 15 which offically supports 4800MT/s in the Intel documentary and we get no further informations what you're expecting from this, it's hard to tell what to do.

In my suggestion the newer 48GB modules are build the same way as the "regular" 32GB modules. Double sided. While the 12th gen CPU's didn't make any difference between double and single sided modules ( just talking about the Intel documentation ) only in case of the 4 Slot design ( which only allows 3600MT/s on double sided RAMs by using the full 4 Slots support ), they should run in their specified speed which is a maximum of 4800MT/s for the 12th gen HX so far ( doesn't matter if there's an XMP profile of 5600 written in your modules, cause XMP isn't activated ).

In one point I'm in to you. The description of the BIOS versions are lousy. They're still talking about "performance optimizations" done in the latest version, but what excactly... We'll never know.

Just my 2 Cents and the stuff I figured out so far.

If it comes to the undervolting theme, I only can leave some experience made by myself on my own Scar 18. Beginnig from BIOS version 302 it was maximum possible to get -30mV undervolting. In further BIOS versions ( don't know exactly, maybe 308 or something like that ) it was possible to raise the undervolting to a maximum of -80mV. In some benchmarks and stabilty tests I figured out, that my system is running best at -60mV but that should depend on your own system, your preferences.

Some last words for here.

This all just works fine for me and my laptop. That didn't mean this should work on your machine also. I'm only an enthusiast privat person how tries to help out others with slightly the same problems.

[Flo]

---

@Yokehoo wrote:

(...) there is still no support of XMP profiles in the 2023 or 13th gen models !!! On CPU-Z you can only see a few of the JEDEC standard profiles as you can see in the encounter numbers JEDEC#8 JEDEC#9 JEDEC#10 profiles in the screenshot of Flo... XMP ist NOT activated and can't be activated in BIOS either.

---

We can see in my screenshots that this is the XMP profile that is used for my memory sticks (Gskill DDR5-4800 CL34):

If XMP is not activated then RAM Sticks should run at best at JEDEC#8 (CL36).

So I don't think we can conclude XMP is not activated considering my screenshots.

A possible theory (I'm not sure):

On desktop motherboard, XMP can be activated or deactivated.

Could it be possible ASUS did implement XMP setting in AUTO mode in their laptops so it is activated automatically with DDR5-4800 but deactivated with DDR5-5600?

It seems to be the case as for me :

-my DDR5-4800 is defintively running XMP profile

-Kinston Fury DDR5-5600 is reported to run at 5600 CL40 but these ram sticks do not have any XMP profile (only 4 JEDEC profiles)

-it seems all users with DDR-5 5600 that require XMP to run at 5600 have troubles.

Without any visibility on Bios hidden settings, it is hard to know.

[Yokehoo]

Hi Flo,

this is slightly confusing, cause your RAM sticks shown XMP 3.0 in CPU-Z in the top right corner, that's right but as you said, we don't know if XMP is activated or not while it's a hidden feature in the BIOS. Let's have a closer look to my sticks and we'll get slightly more confused 😁

Only shown 4 JEDEC profiles with missing XMP 3.0 info

As we can see there's a missing info of XMP 3.0 instead of your info to your sticks meanwhile we where only shown 4 of the JEDEC profiles ( which are in real much more then only the shown 4 profiles ). That's right so far. In the back there are still more existing JEDEC profiles like JEDEC#1 and following numbers AND the existing XMP profiles which are also not shown, too. If there where only the 4 shown JEDEC profiles, the RAM should be running at 5600MT/s cause JEDEC 8-11 are all for 5600MT/s 😉

Used timings @ 5200MT/s

RAM readings on HWInfo

This get's me to my thought, that XMP isn't activated. If XMP is activated, it might also been working on all other RAM sticks and therefore our modules should run at 5600MT/s like it's set in the XMP profile of the stick ? I don't think that there's a separate XMP profile for 5200MT/s on 5600MT/s sticks. So I came to the conclusion, that my timings used on this machine here are programmed in one of the other JEDEC profiles ( we can't see at all ), cause the actually timings are slighlty faster then the shown once in any software and I don't belive that any BIOS is training RAM timings by themselves and overwriting JEDEC profiles. So this should be one of the programmed and loaded JEDEC ( or maybe XMP ) profile from the RAM itself where the BIOS gets into POST and figures out which timings ( or profile ) are the fastest whithout any issues reading from the profiles programmed on the RAM.

So these are my thoughts how this works in here, but like you said: it's hard to know while XMP is a hidden setting in our BIOS and the only info we get in the BIOS updates is "optimized system performance". Years before it was much more easier to figure out what kind of BIOS settings are implemented, which are activated, which are hidden and what kind of stuff is programmed by using some Tools that show all of these features.

At this moment it's still like a guessing game. Is it activated ? Is it working ? Is it only working on 4800MT/s modules and if so, why are the faster modules not even using XMP profiles ? Questions over questions.

But let's say, ASUS has worked on this in the past and some of us can now use the 5200MT/s for larger double sided modules and 5600MT/s for single sided modules which are the official Intel supported specs.That's a big step forward. So if ASUS decides to unhide the XMP feature in future BIOS Updates, we'll know exactly what's going on in our machines.

After all I have to say, that these are good points from you @Flo and this is a good discussion with you guys in here 👍 

Let's see what future updates will do. I'm excited to see what will happen next.

[Flo]

Yes definitively a good discussion!

From there the only remaining solution will probably to ask help in Bios Mod forum : https://www.bios-mods.com/forum

I think they would be able to reveal hidden settings with ease. I will ask them if I have enough time this weekend, as it require to extract current bios with a special tool (does not look complicated but take time)

Back to your experience with your ram sticks: I am yet to find a confirmation from Intel that dual-rank modules are supported up to 5600, for me it is limited to 5200 as specified in this documentation: https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/743844/743844-005.pdf 

If you do have more information on this subject, please share it I'm interested

[Yokehoo]

Yeah, BIOS Mods are years before where we implemented our own logos instead of the energy star logo and try to unlock some hidden features in the old Award, AMI or Phoenix BIOS 😄 Good old times. For now I don't experiment with all these things anymore. There are too many switches to play with and only one false click can damage your system. So I decided to work only with the original versions made by some professionals over the last years cause you'll never know what a 3rd person will write into your files 👍 And over all this time ( from the past till today ), you where given so much more options as we can see in the most desktop models, that it's sometimes hard to completly understand what all these switches do 😂

Therefore ( and if we're talking on stable laptop designs with slightly harder BIOS backup, reset, restore or changing options ) it's a good way not to play with all the limits and hide some features which can possibly damage your system. Even if I wish that we can get access to the XMP Option. I think, this is one of the lower risk settings if we just get the option to select preselected XMP profiles in BIOS without any of the deeply single timings like in some desktop models possible. Just a switch where I can select XMP-1 or XMP-2... I don't want to absolutly max out my RAM within tuning every single timing 😉

To be honest, I trust in the jobs done by the RAM manufaturers and my mind is realy overflown when you ask me, what a single digit in all these timings here realy do or effect my system 😂 So a simple XMP switch in the BIOS would be helpful where I can select the 5600MT/s programmed by the manufaturer of my RAM.

The screen of the Intel document you posted is absolutly correct. Single sided RAM is supporting 5600MT/s and double sided are maxed out at 5200MT/s. But this is stock support of the CPU. If we've a look at our desktop models, the same specs where set for the desktop CPUs like i9-13900K while the RAM kits are meanwhile supporting up to DDR5-8000 and faster in XMP. This means to me, if XMP is eventually become available, the RAM will be slightly overclocked to run at it's 5600MT/s programmed by the manufacturer with it's supported timings. The same way the desktop models do.