Make QVLs great (again) !?
It’s nothing new that all hardware components, including motherboards, are subject to production variances. That’s actually what quality assurance in production and QVL in specifications are for, to limit variances and ensure a certain minimum performance when components interact. A prime example of this is the Asus Maximus Z690 Apex. Because even though the motherboard has already become a meme and running gag for inconsistent DDR5 overclocking in the enthusiast community, you really have to give Asus credit for making sure that every motherboard actually complies with the QVL.
If a motherboard does not manage to run a RAM kit from the QVL list with the specified XMP profile, the warranty takes effect and the board is replaced by Asus. That’s the way it should be! And mind you, the “production variance in CPUs” is not used as an argument here. For example, the RAM manufacturer Crucial also defines its QVLs like so; as a minimum performance that is guaranteed.
But anyone who wants to point the finger at Gigabyte right away is making things too easy for themselves. Other manufacturers also effectively use the “Silicon Lottery” as an excuse for supposed quality fluctuations in their boards, and not just since DDR5. Sometimes it even goes so far that the QVL is misused as an extended marketing tool, whereby the fastest, supposedly compatible kits are not even available for purchase. But even then, manufacturers could still distinguish between compatibility with manual tuning or by only loading the XMP profile – we remember the columns in the QVL.
Even though I as an enthusiast enjoy manual RAM overclocking and tuning, as masochistic as it may sound, I of course understand that this cannot be demanded from the vast majority of users. Accordingly, it is at least my opinion that buyers should be able to rely on the QVLs of the motherboard and RAM manufacturers, so that a kit listed there will always work, no matter with which CPU. In return, these lists should be kept rather more conservative, at least as far as explicit “XMP compatibility” is concerned and especially at the beginning of a new standard like DDR5. And if you really want to advertise how much more clock is still possible with manual tuning, then this should please also be marked accordingly and clearly distinguishable from the “plug and play” functionality. Or how do you see it? Feel free to let us know in the forum thread.
Thanks again to Ro77b for sending in the motherboard and sharing his buyer experience!
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