X.M.P. or NOT?

[TedH777]

I have been running 8GB of G.Skill Trident 4x2GB in my system for a while now with absolutely no issues. I have a Gigabyte P55-UD4P motherboard and when I put my system together I simply enabled XMP profile1 and the memory ran at DDR3-2000. I have recently started reading your forums and found a bios setup guide for the similar P55-UD3R which shows all settings manually entered and XMP profile disabled. Is there any reason why I should consider disabling XMP and manually configuring my bios or if things are working now should I leave it alone? Am I getting the best performance from my RAM (without pushing the limits) or are there easy gains to be had? What are the benefits and disadvantages to using XMP?

[smanet]

Hello Ted,
I'm disabling the XMP profile to enter the data by myself just during OC sessions. That's because normally XMP settings can be tweaked, or I just need similar settings but not the one stored in the profile.
Tweaking a 4 sticks setup could be tricky... So, if you aren't OCing or you are just satisfied with your RAM performances, the XMP hits your goal: stability and performance in few settings.

[Tradesman]

Smanet hits it pretty good, if your stable and pleased with what you have then XMP is working for you, if you want to OC and try and get that last extra bit available for OCing or Benchmarking, manual is the way to go. Thing with XMP, is it sort of works off templates so you may not always get the optimal timings

[TedH777]

Thanks for the replies. That is sort of what I was thinking. Since DDR3-2000 is considered an overclock as it is I will probably leave it as is for now. Maybe if I get some free time later I might try tweaking for a little more.

[Tradesman]

Just remember to write down your current settings so you have a fall back position you know is stable