Test System

Testing Rated Speeds

This is the "natural" XMP profile; 3000 MHz with 16-18-18-38 timings and a 1.35V operating voltage, which is as expected.



This, now this is the ROG Certified profile, which is not 3000 MHz, but 3200 MHz!!! WHUT!?! So, if you use these sticks on an ASUS motherboard, you'll have access to an immediate "overclock", although this overclock is most definitely supported. Team group asked me if I had an ASUS board for memory testing, and of course I do, but they did NOT explain why, and let me discover this for myself. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to support ASUS boards since ASUS almost always sells more enthusiast boards than other brands, but at the same time, this is just the same as a secondary XMP profile.

Now, you may ask why using an ASUS board would matter, and it's all about the sub-timings. The evidence is in the benchmark results. When it comes to memory performance differences between motherboards, sub-timings are almost always the brunt of what makes the difference, although circuit optimizations can have a considerable impact as well. Since the sticks are more than 100% stable at those increased "ROG Certified" clocks, and do still have some overhead, it is likely that with some manual tweaking, you can get these sticks stable at these ROG Certified speeds on other boards (or even higher), but only ASUS ROG boards will offer the automatic profile that takes care of all the tweaking for you.