ram Upgrading RAM, unsure about compatible speeds for Motherboard

[Destro62]

I am looking to upgrade my RAM to 32Gb (2x16GB) but im not sure if my motherboard (ASUS MAXIMUS VIII RANGER) will be able to utilize the 3600Mhz RAM i'm considering. Would I be better off buying lower speed Ram instead?.

Budget (including currency):  around £120

Country: United Kingdom

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Game Development, web browsing (lots of tabs), programming, having lots of programs open at the same time

Other details:

Current PC

CPU: i7-6700k

RAM: 16GB HyperX FURY DDR4 2666MHz (4x4GB)

Motherboard: ASUS MAXIMUS VIII RANGER

Graphics Card:GTX 980

Storage: Samsung 860 Evo SSD, 1TB, 2TB HDD

Monitors: 2560 x 1440 165Hz, 2x 1920 x 1080 60Hz

Options I'm Considering:
Corsair Vengeance LPX Black 32GB 3600MHz 2x16GB

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2X16GB) DDR4 3200Mhz

[yonter25]

36 minutes ago, Destro62 said:

I am looking to upgrade my RAM to 32Gb (2x16GB) but im not sure if my motherboard (ASUS MAXIMUS VIII RANGER) will be able to utilize the 3600Mhz RAM i'm considering. Would I be better off buying lower speed Ram instead?.

Budget (including currency):  around £120

Country: United Kingdom

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Game Development, web browsing (lots of tabs), programming, having lots of programs open at the same time

Other details:

Current PC

CPU: i7-6700k

RAM: 16GB HyperX FURY DDR4 2666MHz (4x4GB)

Motherboard: ASUS MAXIMUS VIII RANGER

Graphics Card:GTX 980

Storage: Samsung 860 Evo SSD, 1TB, 2TB HDD

Monitors: 2560 x 1440 165Hz, 2x 1920 x 1080 60Hz

Options I'm Considering:
Corsair Vengeance LPX Black 32GB 3600MHz 2x16GB

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2X16GB) DDR4 3200Mhz

The maximum speed of ram I see supported on your motherboard is 3400mhz

[Tegneren]

According to the manual your motherboard supports up to 3400MHz RAM, but the QVL only has verified up to 3000MHz.

The CPU only support 2133 MHz officially, but you should normally be able to run at higher speeds. How high is however dependent on the silicon lottery.

I dont think I would gamble on anything higher than 3000 MHz, unless price is the same. You can always run them at lower than the rated speed, you just may have to do the tuning manually in stead of rely on XMP

[Destro62]

22 minutes ago, yonter25 said:

The maximum speed of ram I see supported on your motherboard is 3400mhz

 

19 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

According to the manual your motherboard supports up to 3400MHz RAM, but the QVL only has verified up to 3000MHz.

The CPU only support 2133 MHz officially, but you should normally be able to run at higher speeds. How high is however dependent on the silicon lottery.

I dont think I would gamble on anything higher than 3000 MHz, unless price is the same. You can always run them at lower than the rated speed, you just may have to do the tuning manually in stead of rely on XMP

Ok thanks. I'll maybe go with the 3200MHz option then since its the same price as the 3000MHz.

I did check my current Memory clock speed using afterburner and apparently it's at 3505MHz despite my current RAM only being 2666MHz. I haven't overclocked anything. I don't know if this changes anything?

[Tegneren]

2 minutes ago, Destro62 said:

 

Ok thanks. I'll maybe go with the 3200MHz option then since its the same price as the 3000MHz.

I did check my current Memory clock speed using afterburner and apparently it's at 3505MHz despite my current RAM only being 2666MHz. I haven't overclocked anything. I don't know if this changes anything?

The "memory" in Afterburner is the VRAM not the RAM, I dont think it monitors RAM speed at all, Only usage. Check the Performance tab in Task manager to see what speed the RAM are running at, or CPU-z if you have it

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Max supported speed is complete bullshit, same for qvl

 

If you want to have a reference as to what your platform and board are capable of, read up online of other ppl messing around with ram oc shenanigans on your platform and/or board

 

 

It is a very early gen ddr4 platform so i wouldnt expect much more than 3200, though that doesnt mean buying higher bin rams like 3600 c18 is useless. I would suggest ballistix in either 3000 c15 or 3200 c16 as a way to get high ram speeds as ballistix usually have micron rev e which is very light on the imc so even garbage imc can perform decently with it, though i dont suggest paying >20£ markup vs the cheapest 3000/3200 bin available since ram speed dont matter that much

[Destro62]

5 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

The "memory" in Afterburner is the VRAM not the RAM, I dont think it monitors RAM speed at all, Only usage. Check the Performance tab in Task manager to see what speed the RAM are running at, or CPU-z if you have it

Ah ok, CPU-Z says its 1335.9 MHz, I read your suposed to double it so that seams to be as it should be.
Is it a bad idea to go with the 3600MHz (or maybe 3200) for the sake of having if and when I get a motherboard that can utilize it?
Will it just not work for my current setup? or will it work fine as long as the speed is lowered?

Will the computer automatically set it to whatever speed it can manage? or will I have to set speed in manually in BIOS?

[Tegneren]

1 hour ago, Destro62 said:

Ah ok, CPU-Z says its 1335.9 MHz, I read your suposed to double it so that seams to be as it should be.
Is it a bad idea to go with the 3600MHz (or maybe 3200) for the sake of having if and when I get a motherboard that can utilize it?
Will it just not work for my current setup? or will it work fine as long as the speed is lowered?

Will the computer automatically set it to whatever speed it can manage? or will I have to set speed in manually in BIOS?
 

Yes, DDR stands dor Double Data Rate, so the actual speed it runs at is 1336MHz doubled to 2666 MT/s. (Mega Transfers is the proper unit for RAM speed, not MHz) 

3600 sticks should work, but not necessarily at that speed. 

 

The Bios will set them to the stock speed automatically, which is 2133 in most cases. The RAM stics themselves will have a XMP profile stored on them that you can activate in bios to get the rated speed and timings. Some also have secondary profiles at lower speeds you may choose from. 

Other than that you have to set it manually, but some motherboards has some pre-set values you can choose from that may or may not work for that particular RAM set. 

[Tegneren]

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Max supported speed is complete bullshit

For CPU, sure. But many motherboards will not let you put in higher speeds than what they officially support. 

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

same for qvl

This i agree with(unless it for early Ryzen) , it only tells the one they bothered to test. I just found it strange they didn't list anything above 3000, but maybe that what was reasonable available at the time I don't remember. 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

16 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

For CPU, sure. But many motherboards will not let you put in higher speeds than what they officially support. 

Its a maximus board and as expected it allows higher ram speed than supported but 4800mhz hwbot under ln2 is pretty discouraging esp when its samsung 4gbit e die which can clock very high even on air as buildzoid has shown in multiple vids, thats the extreme version of this board too

 

In that case i suggest ballistix to lighten the load on the garbage old imc so you can run decent ish speeds (3600/4000), though it could just be garbage ram topology since it is an early board, but seeing as my first gen ddr3 imc x58 does a respectable but somewhat slow 2200 ddr3 (cpu limit) i dont think topology will be a limiter

[Destro62]

@Tegneren, @Somerandomtechyboi Thanks for the all advice. It's all alot clearer now