Memory and the QVL

[quantacide]

Building a first workstation after at

least 10 years and my how things have changed, from quality of cases to memory selection complexity. 
 

I’ve got the ASUS X570-Ace WS and a Ryzen 3900x. Currently have 16GB G.SKILL Trident Z 3000/CL 16 which is on the ASUS QVL. In an ideal world I’d go to 3600 CL 16 but haven’t found the intersection of something that matches the QVL and what’s available. 

 

I say ideal world because I will prob upgrade

to 32GB in 6 months and want the fastest I can to match. 
 

How much do I need to do a full stop with the QVL? It only goes to 3200 and I know there is a “3600 sweet spot” for the Ryzen. 

[WereCat]

I found the QVL to be quite useless on my X570 ASUS motherboard. 

 

My kit is supported only for 2x16GB 3200CL16 and I run it at 4x16GB 3600CL14.

 

There were issues with it at first (ASUS set a low current limit by default for DRAM in the BIOS which caused the system to randomly shut down but I fixed it by raising the limit). 

OFC, nothing is guaranteed to run 100% of the time if its not on QVL but the chances are that it will run just fine if you are willing to tinker with it a bit. 

 

BTW ASUS support was quite useless when I contacted them about my random shut down issue and they just told me that my DRAM is not on QVL and I should just get different kit. 

Yet at the time they also claimed that the motherboard supports up to 128GB RAM but there was no 128GB kit on their QVL. 

[Samfisher]

The QVL isn't updated when new RAM is released so it's kinda blah.  Just go with whatever other people have confirmed is working.

[quantacide]

9 hours ago, WereCat said:

Yet at the time they also claimed that the motherboard supports up to 128GB RAM but there was no 128GB kit on their QVL. 

This is great. Sounds like I may do more shopping. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

11 hours ago, quantacide said:

How much do I need to do a full stop with the QVL? It only goes to 3200 and I know there is a “3600 sweet spot” for the Ryzen. 

The QVL is basically "we tested with this RAM and found the optimal configuration settings for it." It may mean you have to do some tweaking to get the most out of any RAM that isn't on the QVL.

[quantacide]

I actually started w/ 16GB G.SKILL 3000 CL16, then 3600 CL18, and now I’m on 32GB 3200 CL16 Corsair. They’re all supported to varying extents on the QVL and all seem to be well supported based on reviews. The 32GB takes 2/4 slots which will give me headroom to double the RAM in the near term.