Ryzen Performance in Single Channel?

[Emberstone]

I have a stupid question. Since Ryzen's performance looks to be heavily impacted by memory, how much of a negative effect would someone suffer if they were to only put, say, a single 8GB or 16GB stick into their system vs. running 2x4GB or 2x8GB in dual channel?

 

I ask this because, depending on pricing, I might only be running on one 8GB stick for a few weeks if I upgrade when Ryzen 5 releases soon. I'm just curious about how gimped I'd be in the meantime.

[Princess Luna]

Minimal, the biggest change in performance from single to dual channel as far as I remember happens on Intel iGPU's that can get quite the benefit, other than that in real life performance it's minimal, not that you shouldn't try getting it in dual channel though but 4gb sticks in my opinion should be avoided nowadays, better off with 2x8gb where you can get a 1x8gb first and add another down the line.

[Thinkfreely]

Ram size will impact certain applications (Been bench-marking my Ryzen) but more than size, speed definitively impacts performance. I had a 200+ different after overclocking my ram from stock in Cinebench, and 5-10 fps improvement in games. Most likely because SMT applications take advantage of that speed.

[PCGuy_5960]

8 minutes ago, Emberstone said:

I have a stupid question. Since Ryzen's performance looks to be heavily impacted by memory, how much of a negative effect would someone suffer if they were to only put, say, a single 8GB or 16GB stick into their system vs. running 2x4GB or 2x8GB in dual channel?

Make sure to get high frequency DDR4, because this matters with Ryzen

[Emberstone]

3 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Minimal, the biggest change in performance from single to dual channel as far as I remember happens on Intel iGPU's that can get quite the benefit, other than that in real life performance it's minimal, not that you shouldn't try getting it in dual channel though but 4gb sticks in my opinion should be avoided nowadays, better off with 2x8gb where you can get a 1x8gb first and add another down the line.

Sounds good. Thanks, Princess of CPU knowledge.

[Emberstone]

Just now, PCGuy_5960 said:

Make sure to get high frequency DDR4, because this matters with Ryzen

I'm going to grab 3000 MHz DIMMs.

[PCGuy_5960]

Just now, Emberstone said:

I'm going to grab 3000 MHz DIMMs.

Try to get your hands on 3600MHz, it will help a lot, especially in gaming....

[Cyracus]

Given that memory speeds do have a tangible effect with Ryzen it's quite possible single channel will incur a performance drop from dual, but if it's only gonna be a few weeks I'd recommend the 8gb stick and another later, I'd also suggest making sure to get Ryzen optimized ram

[DocSwag]

3 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Try to get your hands on 3600MHz, it will help a lot, especially in gaming....

3600 is a bit expensive though . If OP can that'd be great though after 3200 is where the price REALLY starts going up.

[Emberstone]

4 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Try to get your hands on 3600MHz, it will help a lot, especially in gaming....

Looks pretty pricy, but I'll see what I can do. I saw the benchmarks for this, and barring the difficulty of getting it stable, they look pretty tasty.

[Folktale]

On ‎30‎-‎03‎-‎2017 at 1:12 AM, Emberstone said:

Looks pretty pricy, but I'll see what I can do. I saw the benchmarks for this, and barring the difficulty of getting it stable, they look pretty tasty.

Can you link link me to the RAM you ae using?