what RAM you choose can have a profound effect on the performance of your new
gaming pc but because memory isn't as
sexy as cpus or graphics cards it often
gets overlooked well not today
behind me courtesy of g skill is 11 kits
of dual channel ddr4 memory and with it
we intend to ARM you guys with all the information that you need to choose the
best option for your new 3rd gen AMD ryzen system what's going in and out of
your pc when you're connected to the internet well with glasswire you can
find out and see if there are any suspicious or badly behaving apps use
offer code Linus to get 25 off at the link in the video description
AMD's new zen 2 course have twice as much onboard on-board high-speed cache
which keeps them fed with data much more efficiently than before
which is great but the thing is all of that cache still
has to pull data from somewhere which means that we still need fast system
memory now third gen ryzen increases the
stock supported memory speed all the way up to a whopping 3 200 megahertz that
means that not only can you count on that speed being a good fit for the
platform you can also count on being able to achieve much higher speeds than
you previously could and that's even without the best RAM chips that money
can buy and a degree in overclocking from the university of oh my god i'm so
bored when will this end so that sounds great
just buy the fastest cheapest RAM you can find and run that is what i might
say if it weren't for the close relationship between memory bandwidth
and the high speed interconnect between ryzen CPU cores called the infinity
fabric now this generation AMD has opened up some new and interesting
options by allowing users to decouple the infinity fabric clock from the
memory clock so from stock speed around 3200 up until around ddr4 3600 which
most people should be able to hit you'll be at what AMD refers to as one to one
that is to say both the memory and the infinity fabric share the same input
clock and run in sync just like last gen but it's also possible to crank your RAM
speeds much higher than you otherwise could by abandoning that one-to-one
ratio so that needs to be investigated
because higher memory speeds should yield an increase in raw throughput but
they could also cost you dearly because of the extra latency that is introduced
due to the unsynchronized clocks making matters even more complicated you
can also go the other way and crank your
infinity fabric clock even if you have slower memory modules that can't keep up
then you can try to make up some of that latency penalty by tightening up your
RAM timings so we began our journey by making some
educated guesses first because the infinity fabric is
known to reliably hit 1800 megahertz
investing in a ddr4 3600 kit and running
that at one to one should be a pretty safe bet and then the
lower the rated latencies the better the overall performance in theory
second there's probably a higher tier of
performance to be had by decoupling the infinity fabric and the memory speeds if
you're willing to put in the work because otherwise why in the devil would
AMD have put the engineering resources into making that an option
many questions still remain though so to answer them we gathered our giant pile
of g-skill tridency memory high speed low latency kits high latency low speed
kits and then everything in between and locked Anthony in a room until he was
finished testing them let's start on the lower half of the
performance spectrum here we see that memory speeds lower
than 3 200 megahertz are in fact pretty harmful to Ryzen 3rd gen's overall
performance that is unless we run slow but very low
latency memory and then crank our infinity fabric as high as we possibly
can which on our chip was about 1900
megahertz that actually yielded performance
similar to our low latency 3200 megahertz kit
but at two thirds the memory clock speed
so then if you can't afford or find a high frequency RAM kit cranking your
infinity fabric could help make up a lot of the difference especially if you get
a golden chip then when we switch to the higher performance kits things get even
more interesting now at first as you might expect going
from 3200 to 3600 and then 37 33
megahertz makes for some pretty healthy boosts in performance particularly on
those low latency kits but look what
happens when we go to 3 800 megahertz and beyond
as a result of the higher latencies involved with memory this fast and the
desynchronized infinity fabric we actually end up losing some performance
putting our infinity fabric back to 1900 megahertz which is the highest that ours
will go without crashing we do pick back up a little bit particularly with our 3
800 megahertz kit since that can run at that nice sweet one to one ratio
now as of writing ddr4 3600 can be found
for around the same price as 3200 depending on where you live and where
you look so we also tried running both of those memory frequencies at the
maximum infinity fabric clock that we could muster and it turns out that
depending on the application this can provide a boost or a slight hindrance to
your overall performance finally because Anthony couldn't leave
well enough alone we ran the fastest one-to-one ratio kit that we could and
tightened up the timings to test memory overclocking potential and holy shmoley
with averages anywhere from two to eight percent higher than our previous best
and percentiles jumping up by up to 27
we've not only validated our low latency results for the 21 33 megahertz kit but
we can also confidently say that aggressively tightening timings on any
memory kit on ryzen can dramatically improve your gaming experience
if not your cinebench score which didn't really seem to care about any of this
unfortunately this is where our journey into high-speed memory on Ryzen 3rd
gen ends at least in these early days
we did manage to reach 4 000 megahertz RAM stable by the way guys but we had to
dig deeper into system voltage adjustments that were not that
comfortable recommending to the average user and then we weren't able to get
anything beyond that to post at least with our CPU the good news is that we've
already got enough results to boil down our recommendations to a few key points
number one don't stress the super high
memory speeds and instead target memory that your system can support
if all you want is something that's fast but that you know will work grab a 3600
megahertz kit with low latencies number two if you're adventurous
go for it get a higher end kit and see how far you can push your infinity
fabric the worst case scenario is you can clock the memory down and use dram
calculator verizon to help you convert that extra speed headroom into tighter
timings it's not going to result in worse performance under any
circumstances number three if your region's market is
bad for memory pricing or availability you really shouldn't stress too much
find a low latency 2133 memory kit and
focus on overclocking your infinity fabric you'll still be getting darn near
the full experience it really is a testament to how good of a job AMD has
done in engineering there's n2 course that even though of course memory does
still affect performance it's not quite as
necessary to get a great experience as
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