G.Skill Trident Z RGB F4-3200C16-8GTZR only stable running at 2933

[TC]

Hi,

 

I have had my PC for over a year now and everything was working perfectly.

The Components are:

AMD Ryzen 5 1600X OC - 4GHz

Gigabyte RTX2070 8GB

G.SKILL F4-3200C16D-16GTZR Trident Z RGB Series 32GB (8GB X 4) DDR4 3200MHz

Samsung 970 Evo 250GB

Samsung 970 Evo Pro 500GB

AUS ROG STRIX B450-F Gaming AM4/B450/DDR4

EVGA SuperNOVA 750W 80+ Gold Fully modular

 

Now I have only just upgraded to 32GB of ram from having 16GB for a year and had some extra cash lying around and jut thought why not, it would be any hassle at all right? Wrong was I. I installed the ram easy as it is then went into the BIOS reset the CMOS and all that then before OCing the CPU thought I might aswell put the D.O.C.P on at 3200MHz for the ram and make sure it works. Put it on and PC refuses to boot, and then boots in safe mode into the BIOS with the setting reset. I then did it all the way down to 2933MHz where it blue screened twice but now it is stable. I have attempted using AMD DRAM calculator and inputted the value for the safe and fast options and both failed. so I am not back where I started with 2933MHz ram where I have seen people OCing theirs past 3200MHz and I am not sure why it is happening.

 

Here are values from Thaiphoon Burner for help.

[TwilightRavens]

Zen 1 is officially only rated to run 4 sticks at 2400MHz and 2 sticks at 2666MHz per AMD’s official documentation, hence why you are having issues. You are basically relying on silicon lottery in hoping you have a good IMC.

 

Not many people can get 3200MHz stable on two sticks of ram on first gen Zen, let alone 4 sticks.

[TC]

2 hours ago, TwilightRavens said:

Zen 1 is officially only rated to run 4 sticks at 2400MHz and 2 sticks at 2666MHz per AMD’s official documentation, hence why you are having issues. You are basically relying on silicon lottery in hoping you have a good IMC.

 

Not many people can get 3200MHz stable on two sticks of ram on first gen Zen, let alone 4 sticks.

Awesome cheers for the help read up on it more now. Would you recommened a Zen 2 architecture chip or wait for Zen 3 to be released.

[TwilightRavens]

1 hour ago, TC said:

Awesome cheers for the help read up on it more now. Would you recommened a Zen 2 architecture chip or wait for Zen 3 to be released.

Zen2 does well with memory overclocks, because of the ability to adjust the fclk yourself instead of being at the mercy of it being automatic like on Zen and Zen+.
 

The real question is do you have the money for a Zen2 chip? If so there’s no harm in buying it, but when Zen3 launches Zen2 won’t suddenly become totally obsolete and unusable, it’ll still be fine. I love my 3900X and was a worthwhile upgrade over my Z97 and i7 5775C.

[TC]

2 hours ago, TwilightRavens said:

Zen2 does well with memory overclocks, because of the ability to adjust the fclk yourself instead of being at the mercy of it being automatic like on Zen and Zen+.
 

The real question is do you have the money for a Zen2 chip? If so there’s no harm in buying it, but when Zen3 launches Zen2 won’t suddenly become totally obsolete and unusable, it’ll still be fine. I love my 3900X and was a worthwhile upgrade over my Z97 and i7 5775C.

Been researching but only CPUs that I can find that have memory support for quad channel DDR4-3200MHz that is an AMD procesor are the Threadrippers, I will probably be able to locate enough money to afford a Zen2 chip but just wondering if when Zen3 is released the price may drop of the Zen2 chips, my two options I believe are the Ryzen 7 3700X, Ryzen 7 3800X and the Ryzen 9 3900X, the 3700x and 3800x both have 8 cores and 16 threads whereas the 3900x have 12 cores and 24 threads, the base clock and overclocks aren't too different and depending on the chip will vary  and cooling potential. The price is where it comes down to though 3700X is around £270, 3800X is £300 and 3900X is about £395. The difference between the 3700x and 3800x is very miniscule and only a £30 difference, but I don't know if it is worth the 3900X for a £90 increase. Do you think the extra £90 justifies purchasing the 3900X?

[TwilightRavens]

Tldr: If you need 8 cores and want to save a few bucks, go 3700X. If you want 8 cores but better, higher binned ones, go 3800X as they’ll clocker higher than the 3700X, if you need 12 cores for whatever reason and your workload relies on the write performance of the RAM, go 3900X. I bought my 3900X on sale a few months ago for the same price the 3800X launched at, so that was a no brainer for me.
 

 

The 3600(X), 3700(X), and 3800X are single chiplet CPU’s, their memory read and copy speeds are normal, their write speed however is half speed (really does not affect much but it does throw people off) because they only have one link of infinity fabric to the I/O die. However the 3900X and 3950X do not have that issue because they have two infinity fabric links to the I/O die.

 

Yes it’s not officially stated that the Zen2 chips run 4 sticks at 3200MHz but since AMD has tweaked this chips a lot compared to the first and second generation you are a lot more likely to be able to get 4 sticks running at what they are supposed to. As far as getting RAM stable you need to watch out for two things, one being whether or not the motherboard has a T Top or Daisy Chain memory configuration. T Top means it can overclock better when all 4 memory slots are occupied, Daisy Chain is the opposite, it goes higher with just two slots occupied. However even most Daisy Chain boards can do 4 sticks at 3600MHz without much fuss. But anyway yeah Zen2 is a lot less fussy with memory than Zen and Zen+ was due to the massive changes they’ve made to the memory sub system and underlying cache/infinity fabric structure.

 

The major change that we are aware of compared to Zen2 coming to Zen3 is unified CCD cache and CCX’s. Basically right now each chiplet is composed of two quad core CCX’s combined to make a chiplet therefor having 2 x 16MB of L3 cache. And the bigger chips (3900X and 3950X) have 4 x 16MB because two chiplet’s each with 2 x quadcore CCX’s inside (except 3900X has one core in each CCX disabled to make it 12 cores). Zen3 is unifying those quad core CCX’s into a single 8 core chiplet, so instead of having 2 x 16MB of L3 per chiplet, it’ll now be seen as a single 32MB layer of cache per chiplet and will end up being on the bigger chips 2 x 32MB. Along with generational IPC improvements of ~7-15%. Its up to you whether or not you should get it now or wait a bit, but from my testing it’s not too difficult to get quad ram stick configurations working on Zen2 as it was onZen and Zen+.

 

Lastly (sorry for the wall of text), the benefit to Zen2’s memory system over Zen and Zen+ is you are no longer limited to speeds that were almost impossible to achieve (3200MHz was hard to get stable on Zen and 3600MHz was really hard to get stable on Zen+) they made it so you can unlink the infinity fabric from the memory clocks to achieve speeds up to 4600MHz, you can also adjust the infinity fabric clock by itself (commonly referred to as FCLK or IF CLK) because for optimal performance it should be half your memory speed (though DDR applies here so if your FCLK is 1800MHz its really 3600MHz). The con to this memory system over Zen+ is that it does come with a latency penalty, a 3600MHz C16 kit on Zen+ may have had 59-62ns of latency in the RAM, on Zen2 that is commonly 69-74ns of latency, and completely unlinked from RAM speed it’s usually around 82ns.