Building my first pc.

[shaneh890]

I’m building my first computer ever. I ordered the Asrock B450M Pro4 Micro ATX. I bought two sticks of DDR4 8GB at 3200 and running a Ryzen 5 2600. On the Asrock website, it says that it supports 3200 speed but someone said in the review that you had to “turn on your XPS profile for your ram in the BIOS” to get the full speed. They also said that my ram will say it’s running at only 1600 saying that “dual channel divides your MHz by 2”. Is this true? Is that how dual channel runs?

[papajo]

20 minutes ago, shaneh890 said:

I’m building my first computer ever. I ordered the Asrock B450M Pro4 Micro ATX. I bought two sticks of DDR4 8GB at 3200 and running a Ryzen 5 2600. On the Asrock website, it says that it supports 3200 speed but someone said in the review that you had to “turn on your XPS profile for your ram in the BIOS” to get the full speed. They also said that my ram will say it’s running at only 1600 saying that “dual channel divides your MHz by 2”. Is this true? Is that how dual channel runs?

yes

[shaneh890]

2 minutes ago, papajo said:

yes

So does it slow down the memory or is it still running at the fast speeds of 3200

[papajo]

28 minutes ago, shaneh890 said:

So does it slow down the memory or is it still running at the fast speeds of 3200

all ramsticks no matter the mobo are going to have half the frequency wirrten on the model name

 

when you have one 3200 stick it will run at 1600 mhz

 

when you have two 3200 sticks each individual stick will run at 1600 mhz BUT they combine together giving two channels of 1600 mhz (that's why its called dual channel) which practically is the same as saying that the ram runs at 3200mhz

 

if you get 4 3200 sticks (and your mobo and cpu support quad channel) you will have four channels of 1600 mhz so its like having ram that runs at 6400Mhz ryzen 3 doesnt support quad channel mode nomatter which mobo.

 

 

Also mind that your mobo has to support said frequences (and you use the model name number not the actual frequency to check that) so if your mobo says that it supports e.g up to 2666Mhz modules then 

 

if you have one stick of 3200 it will run at 1333mhz (because the mobo limits to that)

if you have two 3200 stick eah of them will run a 1333mhz channel that will essentially being the same as saying your ram runs at 2666Mhz

 

If you want to achieve 3200 on a mobo (and/or CPU) that doesnt support that speed then you have to try to overclock it which is not guaranteed that ittl work so check your motherboards RAM support list and specs to ensure the wanted results.

[svmlegacy]

43 minutes ago, papajo said:

when you have two 3200 sticks each individual stick will run at 1600 mhz BUT they combine together giving two channels of 1600 mhz (that's why its called dual channel) which practically is the same as saying that the ram runs at 3200mhz

This isn't quite right. The modules in this example do run at 1600 MHz on the physical level, but logically they are running 3200 MT/s (mega-transfers per second). DDR, (Double Data Rate) means that the data is transferred on both the rising and falling edge of the signal.

It has nothing to do with dual channel, and is the same reason that triple channel and quad channel aren't labelled at 3x and 4x speeds.

 

The best way to describe this is as a multi-lane highway. DDR allows for the "cars" to be packed twice as close to each other, while Dual-Channel acts as a second lane.

1 hour ago, shaneh890 said:

turn on your XPS profile for your ram in the BIOS”

I assume you mean XMP. JEDEC now supports up to 3200 MT/s as default speeds, though motherboards will limit this. XMP is a one-click overclock that allows you to go beyond motherboard/CPU specifications.

[papajo]

9 minutes ago, svmlegacy said:

It has nothing to do with dual channel,

And that's exactly why I did not mention it, OP asked for frequencies on dual channel and I explained what happens with them.