Buying RAM for the 5800X3D

[An0maly_76]

9 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

My B-dies cost only 135 € ...  (16gigs)

 

The RGB sux but performance seems solid!

That's $148 USD for 16GB, presumably $275-$300 for 32GB. And I have 32GB for $128.

[TechTippee]

14 hours ago, xg32 said:

how did this go from budget ram to minmaxing 

The 5800X3D has a (for now) unique gimmick that puts it in an awkward position. It's a halo-esque CPU in terms of price/being branded as "the fastest gaming CPU", but there are arguments to be made for both giving it god-tier RAM (as you, @freeagent, and others have said, to squeeze every drop of performance out of an expensive CPU), and for using cheaper RAM (as @TrigrHmentioned, the benefits of better memory are less tangible when you're making fewer calls to said memory because of that heckin' chonker cache).
 

On 5/29/2022 at 12:53 AM, An0maly_76 said:

I'd rather get 80% of the performance for $125 than spend another $100 to get the other 20%.

To a large extent, I agree with this sentiment. It's why I didn't go with a DDR5 Alder Lake system. But as @RONOTHAN##pointed out, the price gap is much smaller between memory kits than whole platforms, with an arguably equal impact on performance, making it a tougher call which kit to go with, and the answer will ultimately vary depending on the person.

Personally, I don't care much playing with RAM timings. I want something to set and forget, be it XMP or a one-time manual tune. The performance bump from having dual-rank memory is appealing, and since QVLs seem to provide that information (assuming that doesn't change as much as who provides the chips going into the RAM apparently does), I've got a direction to my decision-making now.

Thank you for your input, everyone. I expect I'll close this as solved in the next day or so, so if you have any further thoughts to add, I'd love to hear them!

[RONOTHAN##]

13 minutes ago, TechTippee said:

assuming that doesn't change as much as who provides the chips going into the RAM apparently does

It does. The only kits that are guaranteed to be dual rank are the solid Hynix DJR bins, Samsung B die bins, and the 32GB DIMMs (so 2x32GB kits are always dual rank). Unless you find a kit that the manufacturer specifically labels as dual rank (usually this is just OEM Memory sticks labeled "2Rx8", but you can figure it out on Corsair and Crucial memory sticks if you get a photo of the sticker on them), it's a crap shoot whether you get single or dual rank, usually being single rank. 

[Mark Kaine]

20 minutes ago, TechTippee said:

The 5800X3D has a (for now) unique gimmick that puts it in an awkward position. It's a halo-esque CPU in terms of price/being branded as "the fastest gaming CPU", but there are arguments to be made for both giving it god-tier RAM (as you, @freeagent, and others have said, to squeeze every drop of performance out of an expensive CPU), and for using cheaper RAM

The truth is... fast RAM is not really necessary for Ryzen CPUs, especially for gaming, p sure AMD still recommends "3000mhz" (which doesn't even work but 2933 works lol)

 

So what i was saying is if you really care about 5-10fps or so more then you should go for "fast" b-die / dr... but if you dont just get the cheapest RAM around 3000MHz, yes. 

 

(thats besides i think this cpu is overpriced,  at least in Europe and because of that in a *really* weird spot indeed)