LTT video of RAM banks and speed x8 vs x16

[PaddyC13]

Hi Folks,

 

Just watched the video on RAM banks and potential speed hit from using x16 RAM rather than x8.  Very few RAM suppliers seem to provide this level of detailed information which is disappointing.

 

I have looked at CPUz and RAMMon but neither utility seems to report how many banks (x value) the RAM has in your system.

 

It may be me not understanding the information correctly and if so could someone please clarify?  Alternatively, is there a utility out there that does report this level of detail?
 

Many thanks

 

Paddy

UK

 

[mariushm]

Try  Aida64 and other similar tools. 

 

 

[PaddyC13]

Thanks @mariushm, I will give this a go and report back.

 

Many thanks 

 

Paddy

UK

 

[Chiyawa]

You can try HWiNFO64.

 

 

Mine is 2 x8 RAM. That's dual rank x8.

[PaddyC13]

4 hours ago, Chiyawa said:

You can try HWiNFO64.

 

 

Mine is 2 x8 RAM. That's dual rank x8.

Thanks @Chiyawa- I will also check this out later when I get home.

 

Many thanks

 

Paddy

UK

 

[mariushm]

So I got home.

For comparison, here's what Aida64 reports for my memory  (yeah, i forgot it on 1333 mhz, don't feel like rebooting pc, it's been running for over a month)

 

[PaddyC13]

Hi @mariushm and @Chiyawa

 

Thank your help so far.  I have installed both Aida64 (trial version) and HWINFO64 on to my laptop where I wanted to check the memory.  Under Aida64 I get the following result which I assume indicates this Corsair RAM is the slower (x16) kind?

 

 

With HWINFO64, I do not see the same information as @Chiyawa as I do not see Banks listed but rather Ranks? Is this because I have DDR4 rather than DDR3 RAM?

 

 

Many thanks

 

Paddy

UK

 

[PaddyC13]

HI @mariushm and @Chiyawa

 

Sorry to chase but can you please confirm my understanding when you have a minute?

 

Thank you for your help.

 

Kind regards

 

Paddy

UK

 

[mariushm]

Look it's complicated to explain

 

The bad, slow sticks of ram are the ones that are 1 rank made out of 4 chips ..a ram stick is 64 bit wide, so you need 4 chips that are 16 bit wide, 8 chips that are 8 bit wide, or 16 chips that are 4 bit wide (mostly on servers)

Your sticks seem to have 8 chips, so you have 2 ranks, each rank made out of 4 chips which are 16 bit wide. Yeah, each rank will be slower compared to a regular stick that would have ranks made with 8 chips each 8 bit wide, but the controller is helped by the two ranks and can use one rank while the other rank or while a bank group in the other rank is busy

So it's not perfect, but not the slowest kind either.. as far as I can see it.

 

This video below may make it easier to understand things

 

 

[nanfe]

Apologies for the necropost, but I'm in the middle of going down a rabbit hole researching this stuff, and this thread came up on google.  It's probably too late for the OP, but I believe mariushm is incorrect about the ram being x16, it's x8.  The RAM is being read as an 8bit device width in HWiFO64 which is what the x8 or x16 value refers to.  The module being read as having 16 banks is correct for x8 as shown in the micron data sheet in the buildzoid video (you can see the datasheet here)  .  If it was x16 Aida64 would've read it as only 8 banks as shown in the datasheet. Mariushm's ram is DDR3 and shows only 8 banks which lines up with this micron datasheet for ddr3 seen on pages 15 and 16.

It was a bit tricky to figure this out since different software uses slightly different terms for different things, but I'm reasonably sure I'm correct, and my own ram matches up.  I have the G.skill F4-3600C16D-32GVKC (not sure why it ends with 16GVKC in the HWINFO64 screenshot below). It has 16 Chips per module and it's being shown as dual rank in all the software I tested and I did send an email (seen below) asking if it was dual rank and at least at the time I purchased them G.skill support said they were. In DDR4 a rank is 64 bits wide (as shown here and many other places) and dual rank means two 64 bit ranks. So in my case with 16 chips times 8 bit width chips is 128 total or 2 64 bit ranks, so my ram is dual rank 8 bit width or more commonly shown on a lot of stick labels as 2Rx8.  Hope this helps anyone else searching this stuff up.