I recently bought a pre-built Ryzen gaming desktop, and I was a little surprised to see that it had been populated with a single 16GB DDR4-2400 stick. This makes upgrading cheaper (only have to buy a single stick instead of two to upgrade), but makes the memory selection process MUCH more complicated.
So firstly, how much does dual channel RAM help Ryzen performance (for both general apps and gaming?) Secondly, how hard is it to get two sticks of RAM not sold as a dual channel set to play nice?
Memorey speed and tight timings are where the gains are.
The above video seems to indicate that it depends on the workload. Some need to have lots of bandwidth, that’s where dual-channel comes in, some need to have lots of speed. that’s where tight timings and outright speed comes in.
I’m not a memory pro, but unless you’re doing ML or database operations, speed and timings are going to be the priority.
So it seems that dual channel is important. Which brings me back to my second question. If I buy a random stick of DDR4 with the same speed and similar timings (but say a different OEM), how likely is it that they’ll function in dual channel mode?
as long as you buy a stick that matches the speed and timing of the stick you already have it should be fine but if you can stretch to it a nice pair of matched sticks of a speed not lower than 3000 with say cl15 would see your performance improve quite a bit on ryzen
Also make sure the ram you buy is on the QVL for your motherboard before buying it
This pre-built is kind of weird. It doesn’t do XMP and will only accept JEDEC timings, which effectively limits me to 2666. But I really don’t want to spend $400 on a 32GB kit, so I guess I’ll try to find some matching CL17 DDR4-2400.
You could sell the single stick and put that money into the new kit.