I want to upgrade my system to 32GB of RAM and I’ve been eyeing this kit: F4-3600C14D-32GVK.
It’s 3600MHz CL14 Samsung B DIE. I’m running a 3700x stock on an Asus Crosshair VIII Impact.
Does it make sense spending 200$ for it in the scope of just getting a fast kit that won’t require any tuning on my part to run fast? I’m already running 3600MHz CL18 RAM Samsung C DIE and I’ve had a terrible time with it (on the third kit now and seems like it’s gonna work forever). Do you think a 3700x can run those speeds plug and play, cosidered the motherboard should help compatibility having only two slots and being placed, at the time, top of the food chain by Asus?
Fast answers here:
Yes
No
I work for G.Skill, need money!
0voters
If you have any suggestion on good kits 3600MHz CL16 or CL14 I could buy for less I’d like to know.
The question distils into: how much is your FPS worth? Spending 200 bucks on how many more fps, if you’re lucky? One? Two? For me, it’s a no-brainer: nope. But then, I’m not a gamer, let alone one of those for whom FPS is GOD
If you’re going to upgrade to a 5800x3d down the road, then it probably would be a good investment as that chip prefers tighter timings over raw speed. Otherwise, nah.
Agree with others here, 32 GB yes, getting RAM down to sub 10 ns latency, not worth it. Though the Impact is a damn good memory OC card… But I would invest in a 5800X3D instead and go with a 3600 @ CL18 for $70.
If you’re not tuning B-die, don’t waste money imo.
If you don’t mind burning a weekend doing some simple tuning, tightening tRAS, tRC, setting tRRD_S and tRRD_L to 4, tFAW to 16 can give you substantial gains.
Caveat is you’ll need to run some sort of mem test afterwards to make sure it’s really stable.
Memory overclocking requires substantial time investment and I honestly wouldn’t have bothered if I had better things to do.
If you’re lucky and everything does smoothly, you can probably do what I suggested in an afternoon. But if things are not stable, you might burn 2 or 3 days with nothing to show for it.
How long do you intend to stay on that platform? That’s usually how I justify the purchase. Also the workload as well of course. For certain games and other operations it was no brainer for me.
First thing first thank you all for helping me decide. A little addendum to the thought process: since I’ve had such shitty luck with the Samsung C DIE by G.Skill I just though “what the hell, now I’m going to buy the best of the best, plug it in and not waste time and money to send kits back to them to replace”.
Maybe I was extremely unlucky and just buying whatever IC from whatever manufacturer is not a big deal.
Your reasoning makes sense. I’m not looking for lost FPSs that much too. The upgrade is also aimed at working more comfortably with all types of softwares, from Matlab to DaVinci.
What was worrying me is the quality of what I’m getting. Is it gonna be a new dance to find a kit that finally works properly?
I can’t scoop FPSs anywhere else and the good latency was an added bonus to that purchase.
That was the next upgrade in mind as a be all and end all of my AM4 plaform journey. But I’m waiting on it because, for now, I’d need to run it at 65W (or 88W PPT) due to cooling constraints. If I had more room I’d buy an NR200P, slap a better cooler on and use the 5800X3D at 105W.
Had already a bad time at XMP speeds, I’m a scared user hahaha
This makes a lot of sense, just like what E-Wasted said. But it needs some “supporting mods” I can’t make right now unfortunately.
Got it! I kinda new that, but at the same time I wanted “the good stuff” to avoid headaches. I would’ve bought 3600 CL16 Micron E DIE but it’s nowhere to be found. Also I might run memory at high-ish temperatures (approaching 60°C). Maybe that would make B DIE unstable aswell?
As long as I can bare to use it. There’s a 4790K machine in the house that got an RX 6650XT upgrade recently.
Games, scientific stuff (Matlab mainly), video editing (DaVinci), VMs. It’s a broad spectrum of things.
60C is a bit hot. I have no idea about B die stability at that temperature, though I can say when tuned it doesn’t tolerate high temperature that well, and is best kept below 45C. When untuned, you’ll probably have additional headroom but I’m not sure how much more headroom you have.
I should also add that dual rank B-dies kits are quite straining on the memory controller, and you might run into stability issues if you didn’t luck out with a strong enough IMC.
Maybe try the G.Skill 3600 16-19-19 kits instead? Those should be using SK Hynix DRAM ICs afaik, but I’m not too certain about that.
My first choice would have been the crucial kits too but those seem to have dried up after Micron discontinued the line.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been reading online aswell.
That’s also a negative point to the kit. Thanks for having pointed that out. I wish there was a way to know if the IMC is decent or not before having to go through the troubles of buying new RAM and work with it.
Doesn’t seem to be any available where I live. I mostly buy off Amazon because physical store that carry any type of “high performance” PC component is non existant.
I don’t know of the workload of scientific stuff but I’ve heard it can be pretty rough. A specific game is what drove my computer to a halt so the upgrade was worth it. Video editing didn’t actually see that big of a difference. VMs on the other hand can definitely benefit from it. Now keep in mind, that’s just my experience and your mileage may vary.
For that I just need the capacity. As far as I know Matlab just loads all it can in RAM (usually with NO regard whatsoever for what’s available) and does it’s thing.
A kit of same RAM I have now gave me issues playing CoD MW in one specific game mode. Everything else was fine. That’s how I found out a kit of RAM was faulty.
Will do! Got any suggestion on a reliable kit? Maybe something you’ve been daily driving for a while? I still feel burned by my past experiences with RAM hahaha
Meanwhile I’m just having daily RAM exchanges with G.Skill…
Had really bad luck with their 16GB RGB Samsung C DIE kit. That’s why I was asking for suggestions.
P.S. on the third kit now and seems like it’s working fine. But, for some reason, sometimes one module just decides to not talk to the motherboard and screwes up all the lights on the system (which are off anyway). Hope this is not a sign of imminent death.
