So I’m taking the plunge and going AMD in November. But i have some Q’s for the Guru’s
Is the 5800x ram maxed out at 3200? And why is two sticks (x2) cheaper than a quad set?
WIll a 650W gold PSU be sufficient? (I currently have an R9 280oc), might grab a 2080 though.
If i wanted to grab a Intel Quad Nic off ebay, becasue im a crazy person, which series should i look for so that i don’t get trash.
I only run at stock - no overclocking
The price difference for the 4x kit seems extreme. But the reason 4x kits cost more is that 3,200 MHz is technically an overclock, and it is much more difficult for Ryzen to run 4 RAM sticks at high speeds. Well to be fair it is more difficult for Intel as well.
Ryzen is a dual channel RAM controller, so 4 sticks is actually sharing time on the channels. It is just more difficult keeping everything in sync electronically.
As for speed, if I was planning a new system I’d probably aim for a pair of RAM sticks at 3,600 MHz. To avoid problems look for the QVL on either the boards or the RAM.
Or do what I actually did, and get a board with ECC support in the BIOS and buy 2,666 MHz unbuffered ECC. Heh.
Not getting the joke.
The AMD literature i read shows the supported ram speed maxed at 3200 MHz.
Yes sorry you are right. I was stuck in the past. 3,200 MHz is officially supported by AMD and by JEDEC it seems. Go for it.
But 3,600 seems to work for most people, and you can always run it at 3,200 if it doesn’t.
The joke is that it is much slower than what you were looking for. I guess? I prefer having no memory errors over speed, personally, but not everyone agrees with me.
I’m running 2 sticks of 16g each gskill 3600 trident z neo on my x570 gigabyte master with a ryzen 5 3600…my first foray into amd CPU’s…former intel, nvidia fanboy
is it running at 3600?
Not really.
But that depends on several factors.
Because a Quad kit are four sticks that are tested and matched together.
And basically ment for HEDT platforms eg TR and intel x299,
that support quad channel memory configs.
Mainstream platforms like Ryzen or Intel Z490 only support dual channel memory configs.
That´s why a kit of two matched sticks are generally cheaper.
yes after going into the BIOS and enabling XMP. It is running at 3614.54. Now I have gone thru 3 BIOS updates since July. I updated to F30 yesterday. 0806201035|720x360
Guaranteed maximum memory controller speed from AMD, yes. Maximum speed the controller can achieve, no. I’m running 16GB of G.Skill Trident Z Neo 3600CL18 and they’re running mighty fine. Also the uplift of using 3600MHz is real. I’m getting 4900ish points in Cinebench stock clocks.
Yes, even for a 2080. But you might be out of the efficiency curve optimal range under load.
Validating four sticks means that all of them will run perfectly for quad-channel which is more expensive to do. Also I think there’s a markup because nobody buys 16GB for a quad channel system anymore.
So then what is the upper limit?
We don´t really know yet because the cpu´s aren’t really in the wild yet.
But i kinda expect with a good motherboard and memory kit somewhere up to 3800mhz ish.
At least that is kinda the ball park that i expect most cpu’s to be at.
Of course higher would be nice, so it’s just an estimation.
But we can’t say for sure untill those cpu’s are widly available for the masses.
Most current 3000 series cpu’s can do 3600mhz / 1800mhz infinity fabric.
But of course this also highly depends on other factors like said memory kit and board.
But i kinda expect that the 5000 series might be able to go a tat higher.
note: it’s just an estimation!.
The upper limit usually doesen’t matter because if you clock the RAM as high as possible you lose the 1:1 ratio between RAM speed and IF speed, which has a negative impact on performance.
When they’re out just get a good kit that can run at the 1:1 rateo through XMP and nothing more. It’s gonna make your life so much easier.
That is wild speculation.
I done goofed a bit, in the sense that the performance gain past the 1:1 rateo is small for the difficulty to achieve high speed and low timings.
Gamers Nexus, as always, has a very good piece on the question and is what I followed in choosing my RAM kit.
3700x running 2 sticks 32gb gskill ripjaws at 3600. I was running at 3200 and there is a gain at 3600, but if you’ll notice it, that’s another story. If you’re shooting for the 5800x, I wouldn’t buy anything less than 3600.
Yeah the easy button highest performance is keeping 1:1 with the Infinity Fabric and RAM base times. On 3000 series that was 1800:1800 (Double Data Rate 3600)MHz, on the 3000xt it was up to 1900:3800 but more commonly 37xxMHz though 3600 was still the usual reccomendation.
And on the 5000 series it is apparently 2000:4000MHz though AMD still said the “Sweet Spot” was 3600MHz RAM, though that may have been to ease 3000 series upgrades worries. I would still go for that and call it done, the controller slightly improved twice now since 3000 and it was stable there so there should be absolutely no issues with 3600MHz on 5000. Just get stuff that has been tested by your motherboard maker and on their approved list, you should be safe.
For myself I have a 3700X with 3600MHz CL16 Ripjawz V G.Skill RAM and it is sweet as a nut. Just a push button in the BIOS and it is all go, you can manually tweak timings there after and really dial them in but I have not bothered, for my general light gaming use it is more than good.
As GN have shown you can go over the 1:1 ratio and get higher performance but you really need fast ram as far as I can see to win out on the 2:1 losses, but it is doable.
I have not bothered with any CPU overclock, just let the boosting do its thing. With 3000 is was pretty close to as good as it gets and with 5000 it is apparently almost completely wrung out so other than exotic cooling you will likely not do better than the CPU managing its own boosts. Just put a decent cooler on it and let 'er rip.
@zionlink @TheF1sh @MetalizeYourBrain @MazeFrame @MisteryAngel @kydwax @zlynx
Is there going to be a delayed roll out of another motherboard series to match the new AMD CPU release?
Not that I know off.
Could be a good time for manufacturers to release revisions, so I am waiting until january or so before pulling the trigger on anything.
Are any of he CPUs going to be left in january?
I don’t know. And at this point I hope to be beyond the blind fanboy and am just tech enthusiast, with enough patience to wait until the initial kinks are hammered out.
