Is ryzen 3000 picky with memory

BurstHearts · April 15, 2020

I want to upgrade from my i3 8100 to a Ryzen 7 3700x. But i use 3 different brands of memory (technically 2 as hyper x uses kingstom memory), and i know Ryzen 2000 was very picky. I have 16GB of ram 1 kingstom, 1 hyper x and 2 kllisre all 2133mhz 4gb each. Eventually i plan to upgrade to 2x8 3200 mhz but it won't be so soon.

Statik · April 15, 2020

Yes. Ryzen 3k works best with dual channel 3600mhz. And with the way RAM is I don't think there's any excuse not to have it.

DailyProcrastinator · April 15, 2020

29 minutes ago, BurstHearts said:

I want to upgrade from my i3 8100 to a Ryzen 7 3700x. But i use 3 different brands of memory (technically 2 as hyper x uses kingstom memory), and i know Ryzen 2000 was very picky. I have 16GB of ram 1 kingstom, 1 hyper x and 2 kllisre all 2133mhz 4gb each. Eventually i plan to upgrade to 2x8 3200 mhz but it won't be so soon.

A lot of Ryzens issues with memory incompatibility was due to bios. I was a 1st gen early adopter and couldn't recommend it to anyone other than enthusiasts because overall my stability issues varied greatly, RAM being one of them. Keep in mind the massive architecture jump Ryzen was for AMD, and all the vendors that sold motherboards had a ton of kinks to work out not only on the platforms but in conjunction with AMD.

Personally with upgrading to an X470 motherboard and updating the bios with my R7 1700 all the issues went away. I have since gone with an R7 3800x and the same X470 board, but stability issues have been a non issue for almost 2 years now. Even when previously OC'ing my CPU and memory. I now have just left my CPU at stock and OC'd my ram to 3400MHz (3200MHz kit) and tightened up my timings, that has yielded the best performance results.

No longer do you need to read your motherboards QVL list to find compatible RAM. Any dual channel (2x8 or 2x16GB) kit of 3200MHz CL16 memory, or faster is recommended. You should be okay with a mix and match but mileage may vary when going past 2666MHz, with an upgrade you will be fine.