So uh
You're all wrong.
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So I ended up canceling my order. It turns out that these "AMD only" DIMMs from China/Hong Kong are made using x4 DRAM chips (from the eBay screenshot you can see they are using 16 SK Hynix H5TQ4G43BFR 4Gb x4 chips), making these 8GB, single-rank, x4 modules. However, 3rd-gen Ivy Bridge consumer CPUs only support x8 or x16 DRAM chips (i.e. what you find in name-brand RAM), as stated in this official Intel datasheet (page 23 of
https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/3rd-gen-core-desktop-vol-1-datasheet.html). I'm guessing this is the case for Haswell too. I wasn't able to find the corresponding technical documentation on the AMD side, but as we all know AMD platforms tend to be less picky about memory compatibility. I hope this helps clear things up for anyone wondering about this in the future!
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Just study any IC's data sheet and you'll notice that there are many more important details, which are usually not mentioned (or else consumers would get even more frustrated than they are). Tolerance values for voltages, power consumption, signal edge steepness, 0/1 threshold levels etc are among the parameters which are usually standardised. I don't know the details in this case but could imagine that if AMD allows for higher tolerance values, this allows vendors to sell chips which they would usually have to destroy because they're slightly out of specification
This post was edited by Rikuo on May 23 2017 11:59am