Recommended Memory for 3000 Series?

I was wondering what the recommendations are for clock and cas latency, as well as a brand of memory for the new Ryzen series. Also what’s the typical price should I expect at different tiers of memory?

I am currently looking at 2x8GB sticks of Ballistix 3600Mhz 16 Cas RAM for ~$120 and am wondering if that’s the sweet spot and/or a good deal.

That should be just fine. What board you using?

There had been some deals on 3600 CAS 15 sticks out there for a bit more, in my opinion if you can find lower latency sticks they can typically be OCed much better but as with anything your mileage varies. At stock memory speeds there isn’t a big difference with CAS 16 unless you’re doing a memory intensive task.

Brands of memory is subjective, some prefer GSkill over Crucial for better prices for similar or lower CAS and others will swear by Crucial for quality standards. Corsair memory in my experience varies from series to series, if you need low-profile RAM due to a heatsink overhang such as CoolerMaster’s 212 with a 2nd fan their low-profile memory is a good choice. (most Ryzen owners either use the stock RGB heatsink fan or AIO liquid coolers so lower profile memory isn’t a decision factor)

I was planning on the B450 Tomahawk.

May just want to look around and make sure the B450 will allow the 3600 to run at those timings and speed. I think I saw somehwere that it can bit can’t seem to find the source. End of day if you can run it at 3200 you aren’t losing much performance overall. Nothing you will notice unless you are keeping close eye on memory intensive program or synthetics benchmarks.

MSI motherboard specs site lists it supports up to “3466 MHz (by A-XMP OC MODE)” which seems to be their own OCing of 3200 Mhz memory.

Haven’t looked at the new BIOS info on B450 boards for RAM speeds after Ryzen 3000 support was added, I would note most only topped out at 3200 and you were into X470 for higher memory clocks–on the price of boards, you could find a decent X470 board without breaking your budget.

I thought that the memory controller was on the CPU so the memory frequency support was going to be more determined by that than the motherboard. Or is there some component to how the motherboard clocks the memory that isn’t determined by the CPU controller?

EDIT:

I just looked at the MSI forums and the Tomahawk may be having teething issues with they 3000 series.

I want to point out that I’m planning on buying a few parts over time. I was thinking about getting the RAM first because I have heard that prices may be going up soon and I want to get ahead of that.

My current build looks like this. I’m happy to change the RAM to a different spec as long as it’s not a huge drop in performance and I am getting a good price. I have no loyalties to brand either.

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD - Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor $329.00 @ Amazon
Motherboard MSI - B450 TOMAHAWK ATX AM4 Motherboard $114.89 @ OutletPC
Memory Crucial - Ballistix Elite 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory $59.99 @ Newegg
Memory Crucial - Ballistix Elite 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory $59.99 @ Newegg
Storage ADATA - XPG SX8200 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive $149.99 @ Amazon
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total (before mail-in rebates) $733.86
Mail-in rebates -$20.00
Total $713.86
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-07-19 23:44 EDT-0400

EDIT 2:
I just found this MSI page and I think it shows that the RAM I have selected should be able to run at 3600MHz.

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