New Mobo - What RAM?

[boomshiva]

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Hello - 

 

I recently purchased an MSI MAG B550M Bazooka motherboard. I'm now in search of appropriate RAM for it.

 

In the spec sheet, it says:

 

DDR4 MEMORY: 4400(OC)/ 4300(OC)/ 4266(OC)/ 4200(OC)/ 4133(OC)/ 4000(OC)/ 3866(OC)/ 3733(OC)/ 3600(OC)/ 3466(OC)/ 3400(OC)/ 3333(OC)/ 3300(OC)/ 3200(JEDEC)/ 3000(JEDEC)/ 2933(JEDEC)/ 2666(JEDEC)/ 2400(JEDEC)/ 2133(JEDEC) MHz

 

Question: do the above specs means that I would need to overclock the 5600x processor I just purchased in order to make full use of any RAM with speeds greater than 3200MHz? In other words, if I buy 3600MHz RAM, but do not OC, the RAM clocks down to 3200MHz?

 

Follow-up Question: How easy or difficult is it to overclock a 5600x so that I can make use of 3600MHz or greater RAM? Will Ryzen Master or MSI's utility allow me to do this?

 

TIA.

 

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, boomshiva said:

In other words, if I buy 3600MHz RAM, but do not OC, the RAM clocks down to 3200MHz?

Basically. It might even go lower depending on the RAM kit. 

 

2 minutes ago, boomshiva said:

How easy or difficult is it to overclock a 5600x so that I can make use of 3600MHz or greater RAM?

For basic settings, it's one setting in the BIOS. Boot up the motherboard and spam the delete key. In the top left corner there will be a button that says "XMP" or "DOCP" (I forget which one MSI boards use). Toggle that on and it will hopefully work. 

 

That said, for higher speed kits, you're likely to run into issues with the CPU memory controller and enabling XMP might not let the system boot. If you don't want to manually tune memory speeds, 3600MHz CL16 is where you should be looking, as 3600MHz is about the fastest ~80% of Ryzen 5000 series CPUs can run without disabling 1:1:1 mode (important for good performance, some CPUs can go upwards of 4000MHz and while there are a couple that can only hit 3200MHz, but 3600MHz is pretty safe), and CL16 is about the sweet spot in price for latencies (lower is better). Basically, don't go out and buy 4400MHz CL19 RAM and expect it to work by enabling XMP and not doing any sort of manual tweaking. 

[GeorgeMKane]

3200MHz or 3600MHz. Whichever can fit in your budget well. I usually go with 3200MHz CL16 or 3600MHz CL16. 3200MHz CL16 is still a solid speed for early 2022.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

You can mitigate the performance penalty of desync fclk by just clocking the crap out of the rams but yea board sucks and doesnt allow 4500+

 

prefferably get some cheap 3200 ballistix and lazy oc to 4000 cl16 with a volt between 1.4-1.5 (basically just change freq and volt only), though if ballistix isnt in the 50-60$ range then just dont bother cause above 60 ish its overpriced, and instead find some rams that have a variety of ram dies they can come with like vengeance lpx, its basically gambling so you are either gonna get some complete garbage hynixes that cant do more than 3466/3733, decent micron dies like on ballistix, or even samsung b die

 

cant really reccomend hynixes here cause the decent ones like cjr/djr either do ~3733 with garbage cl16 timings or 4500+ with garbage cl19 timings

 

if you wanna go 4000+ then youll have to tune it yourself, though most of the time a 3600 oc is acheivable for most rams aka just setting 3600 and potentially raising volt abit, i think theres a ryzen dram calculator that can help with lazy ocing though for knowing your ram dies use thaiphoon burner