Need the fastest DDR5 64GB kit that is guaranteed to work with my build

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

Thought it was as simple as getting the fastest ram, which is 6400 2x32 but apparently it's not that simple! 

I just need the fastest kit that 100% works with a 13900K and 4090 on the Asus Prime Z790-P WiFi. All I want to do is turn on XMP and that's it, no manual OC or anything like that.

 

[RONOTHAN##]

Just now, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

I just need the fastest kit that 100% works with a 13900K and 4090 on the Asus Prime Z790-P WiF

Technically speaking that would be a 4400MT/s rated kit, since that's the fastest that a 13900K is officially able to support. 

 

Practically speaking 6400MT/s should work reliably in a 2x32GB config, though it might take some memory controller voltage manipulation to get it to work if you don't get a particularly good IMC (intel's memory controllers have a lot of variance with them, 13th gen CPUs have a massive range for how good the memory controllers are since Intel doesn't bin their memory controllers). If you don't want to think about it, a 2x32GB kit of DDR5 6000 should work by enabling XMP on 99% of CPUs, though with everything related to fast RAM, your mileage may vary. 

[Dr0idGh0sT]

6 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

Thought it was as simple as getting the fastest ram, which is 6400 2x32 but apparently it's not that simple! 

I just need the fastest kit that 100% works with a 13900K and 4090 on the Asus Prime Z790-P WiFi. All I want to do is turn on XMP and that's it, no manual OC or anything like that.

First of all, I would recommend against this Asus board unless it is on sale.

I can only find 6000J3040G32GX2-TZ5RS in QVL. 

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

6 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Technically speaking that would be a 4400MT/s rated kit, since that's the fastest that a 13900K is officially able to support. 

 

Practically speaking 6400MT/s should work reliably in a 2x32GB config, though it might take some memory controller voltage manipulation to get it to work if you don't get a particularly good IMC (intel's memory controllers have a lot of variance with them, 13th gen CPUs have a massive range for how good the memory controllers are since Intel doesn't bin their memory controllers). If you don't want to think about it, a 2x32GB kit of DDR5 6000 should work by enabling XMP on 99% of CPUs, though with everything related to fast RAM, your mileage may vary. 

Thanks so much for the fast reply, I've been banging my head against the wall on this. 

That's great, I will then settle for 99% chance of a 6000 kit working. 

Would you by any chance have a kit recommendation as well then? I have access to Kingston Fury Beast, Corsair Vengeance, Ripjaws and Trident kits.

And I will power limit the 13900K a bit to make it more efficient, but nothing extreme. 

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

4 minutes ago, Dr0idGh0sT said:

First of all, I would recommend against this Asus board unless it is on sale.

I can only find 6000J3040G32GX2-TZ5RS in QVL. 

Could you please elaborate why the board may not be good though?

It's honestly the best one I could find that doesn't use that controversial Intel Ethernet controller, the one that is plagued with connection drop issues... Since someone warned me about that potential issue in my last thread on here. I'm very much open to board recommendations, if there is anything better out there, that doesn't use Intel's Ethernet.

Afaik my options are the Z790 UD, Z790 UD AX, Z790 GAMING X AX and Z790 AORUS ELITE AX from Gigabyte. Only the Prime Z790-P WiFi from Asus. An obscure Biostar Z790-A Silver board. The entire ASRock board lineup which I don't particularly like at first glance, and no board choices whatsoever from MSI. 

[Dr0idGh0sT]

10 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

Could you please elaborate why the board may not be good though?

It's honestly the best one I could find that doesn't use that controversial Intel Ethernet controller, the one that is plagued with connection drop issues... Since someone warned me about that potential issue in my last thread on here. I'm very much open to board recommendations, if there is anything better out there, that doesn't use Intel's Ethernet.

Afaik my options are the Z790 UD, Z790 UD AX, Z790 GAMING X AX and Z790 AORUS ELITE AX from Gigabyte. Only the Prime Z790-P WiFi from Asus. An obscure Biostar Z790-A Silver board. The entire ASRock board lineup which I don't particularly like at first glance, and no board choices whatsoever from MSI. 

As far as I know WiFi issues have been fixed in BIOS updates.

Asrock and Gigabyte boards have much better VRMs and features in this price range. I would argue that Gigabyte Z790 AORUS ELITE AX is a best option at this price range.

[RONOTHAN##]

23 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

Would you by any chance have a kit recommendation as well then? I have access to Kingston Fury Beast, Corsair Vengeance, Ripjaws and Trident kits.

Any of them should be fine. If you want a better one, go for one of the CL32 or CL30 versions of the DDR5 6000 kits rather than the CL36 kits, but realistically they're all pretty good. For the most part, RAM is RAM, and all of those kits should be just fine. If they're all the same price, I'd probably go for the Kingston Fury kit, just because their heat spreaders tend to be the most substantial, but at the same time if you're not planning on doing RAM overclocking it's not like it makes a difference. 

 

15 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

Could you please elaborate why the board may not be good though?

A couple reasons: 

1. ASUS's quality control as of recent has been mediocre at best. There was the Z690 Hero issue where half the boards had a capacitor soldered on backwards and would catch on fire. There was the issue with the Z690 Apex where despite the board being designed specifically for memory overclocking would top out at 6600MT/s for the first production run even though it was advertised at being able to do 6800MT/s+. There are issues on the Z790 Apex where they have a pretty high rate of DOAs, some boards have memory issues, and a lot of the boards are coming bent like a banana. Their lower end boards don't seem to have as many issues, but if they can't bother doing QC on your top end, high margin products how can you trust them to do it on the lower end boards?
2. That board has a relatively weak VRM. If you were running a 13600K it would be fine, but for a 13900K that can pull a massive amount of power you would want something a bit more substantial to power it. 

15 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

Afaik my options are the Z790 UD, Z790 UD AX, Z790 GAMING X AX and Z790 AORUS ELITE AX from Gigabyte. Only the Prime Z790-P WiFi from Asus. An obscure Biostar Z790-A Silver board. The entire ASRock board lineup which I don't particularly like at first glance, and no board choices whatsoever from MSI. 

If those are your options, get the Elite AX, it's a much better VRM as well as memory topology. It might be using Intel's LAN, though at the same time I've been using Intel LAN for a while and never had an issue, so while it could have some issues it's not guaranteed to have issues. 

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

1 hour ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Any of them should be fine. If you want a better one, go for one of the CL32 or CL30 versions of the DDR5 6000 kits rather than the CL36 kits, but realistically they're all pretty good. For the most part, RAM is RAM, and all of those kits should be just fine. If they're all the same price, I'd probably go for the Kingston Fury kit, just because their heat spreaders tend to be the most substantial, but at the same time if you're not planning on doing RAM overclocking it's not like it makes a difference. 

 

A couple reasons: 

1. ASUS's quality control as of recent has been mediocre at best. There was the Z690 Hero issue where half the boards had a capacitor soldered on backwards and would catch on fire. There was the issue with the Z690 Apex where despite the board being designed specifically for memory overclocking would top out at 6600MT/s for the first production run even though it was advertised at being able to do 6800MT/s+. There are issues on the Z790 Apex where they have a pretty high rate of DOAs, some boards have memory issues, and a lot of the boards are coming bent like a banana. Their lower end boards don't seem to have as many issues, but if they can't bother doing QC on your top end, high margin products how can you trust them to do it on the lower end boards?
2. That board has a relatively weak VRM. If you were running a 13600K it would be fine, but for a 13900K that can pull a massive amount of power you would want something a bit more substantial to power it. 

If those are your options, get the Elite AX, it's a much better VRM as well as memory topology. It might be using Intel's LAN, though at the same time I've been using Intel LAN for a while and never had an issue, so while it could have some issues it's not guaranteed to have issues. 

That's brilliant info guys, thank you. Funny, my friend said to get ASUS because they had good reputation and to avoid Gigabyte because of bad rep. He'll be getting an earful next time I see him if it's the other way around, can't believe he trolling me on my magnum opus build

So that's RAM sorted, but I'm not limited to this mobo price range and I can pick out something more suitable for this system if you guys say that the LAN issues have been fixed and stuff, the list I posted was just for the boards without Intel's Ethernet.

But have to ask though, at the risk of sounding completely ignorant, would those LAN issues even show up for me if I don't use WiFi at all? Because I won't be using any WiFi. But will be gaming online quite a bit and if there's a decent amount of risk of connection issues then that's a big deal-breaker for sure. And if not, then I totally don't mind investing in a suitable premium board now that I realize how important they are to this build.

 

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

1 hour ago, Dr0idGh0sT said:

As far as I know WiFi issues have been fixed in BIOS updates.

Asrock and Gigabyte boards have much better VRMs and features in this price range. I would argue that Gigabyte Z790 AORUS ELITE AX is a best option at this price range.

You sure it's fixed though? I'm trying to find and news about it but can't find anything. It's the only reason why I stuck to this price range, otherwise I can get something more suitable to this build.

[ewitte]

I'm AMD but the 64GB G.Skill F5-6000J3040G32GX2-TZ5N kit I use runs great.  I haven't played much but it booted into windows at 6400 just changing the frequency (still cl30).  

[Kilrah]

From benchmarks there is basically no difference in performance between the slowest and fastest you can get, so if you go with "fastest" you're just wasting money. Look at best value.

[Dr0idGh0sT]

28 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

You sure it's fixed though? I'm trying to find and news about it but can't find anything. It's the only reason why I stuck to this price range, otherwise I can get something more suitable to this build.

Well, I have recommended updating BIOS to few people on reddit who said had some WiFi or Ethernet issues and it fixed it. Also some people have this issue, Not all as far as I'm concerned. 

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

7 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

From benchmarks there is basically no difference in performance between the slowest and fastest you can get, so if you go with fast RAM you're just wasting money. Look at best value.

Damn, thought I would get much more performance.

Well, the best value kit is starting to seem obvious in the Kingston Fury Beast 6000 CL36, compared to a lower latency option at about 45% more money to get Trident Z/Z5 at 6000 CL30. So the choice is basically just between those.

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, RONOTHAN## said:

That board has a relatively weak VRM. If you were running a 13600K it would be fine, but for a 13900K that can pull a massive amount of power you would want something a bit more substantial to power it. 

Is 14 50A stages really not enough for a 13900K? They pull ~250W stock limits enabled, 320W+ when pushed going off a friend's numbers with his, that's not massive power. My X99 chips will pull similar or more and the X99 Classified I have has a 10-phase VRM, 60A stages. 

[RONOTHAN##]

33 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

That's brilliant info guys, thank you. Funny, my friend said to get ASUS because they had good reputation and to avoid Gigabyte because of bad rep. He'll be getting an earful next time I see him if it's the other way around, can't believe he trolling me on my magnum opus build

To be fair, ASUS back in the DDR3 days and less so in the DDR4 days was actually king, it's just that in recent years they've seemed to have been more coasting on that name recognition from people thinking "ASUS always best" when in reality by around Z390 MSI had caught up and by B550 Gigabyte and ASRock had caught up as well (though ASRock I will admit did drop the ball for Z690/Z790), and for value ASUS is in the same region as Apple where they have an ASUS tax, so for the same board as another manufacturer you're spending $20-50 more for an ASUS board on average (sometimes more). 

 

That isn't to say ASUS doesn't still make good boards, the Z790 Apex (if you get one that works) is easily the best Z790 board you can buy and if it weren't $900 and out of stock everywhere I would own, it's just don't be expecting that just because something is made by ASUS that it's automatically great, they're just as able to make bad motherboards as everyone else. 

 

39 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

But have to ask though, at the risk of sounding completely ignorant, would those LAN issues even show up for me if I don't use WiFi at all? Because I won't be using any WiFi. But will be gaming online quite a bit and if there's a decent amount of risk of connection issues then that's a big deal-breaker for sure. And if not, then I totally don't mind investing in a suitable premium board now that I realize how important they are to this build.

To be fair, the LAN issues I remember being reported were for the Intel I225-V and I226-V network controllers, the LAN cards present on those boards, and they're the ones that I've used and not noticed any issues with. I wasn't aware of any WiFi issues, but if those did exist it wouldn't be present if you just used WiFi. 

[RONOTHAN##]

2 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

Is 14 50A stages really not enough for a 13900K? They pull ~250W stock limits enabled, 320W+ when pushed going off a friend's numbers with his, that's not massive power. My X99 chips will pull similar or more and the X99 Classified I have has a 10-phase VRM, 60A stages. 

First I wanna point out that X99 was a FIVR platform, so the VRM needed to provide half the amount of current that a platform like LGA 1700 needs to since the VRM runs at ~2V for X99 rather than the ~1.2V that Z790 needs. Current is the thing that is so hard for VRMs to run, not the overall amount of power, so for the same amount of power drawn the VRM needs to work a lot harder when at 1.2V than at 2V since power is equal to voltage times current. It's the same way that Gigabyte was able to get away with a 4 phase VRM on the Z97X-SOC, an extreme overclocking focused motherboard, it was only powering Haswell with a FIVR so with the current those chips would pull from the VRM meant while it would run hot, it wasn't running hot enough to be dangerous even when the CPUs were maxed out on LN2. 

 

For the actual math, I'm gonna be going off numbers I've gotten for my overclocked 13700K with power values reported by my Z690 Unify-X, so keep that in mind. They will be on the low side for a stock 13900K since it does have 8 less E cores, but it's overclocked so that should hopefully balance it out. 

 

My chip doesn't have any problem pulling over 250A of current under full load, which is approximately 17.5A per power stage. Assuming that the ASUS board is using IR3551 power stages (IIRC ASUS really like International Rectifier parts, and that's their 50A part, so I figure it's a pretty safe assumption for the power stage), that would put it right at the power stages peak efficiency of about 94%. Doing the quick math, that would mean that with a 13900K under full synthetic load you would be having the VRM is putting out over 18W of heat. That's still likely to be able to be dissipated by the heatsink, though it's at the point where I'd want to have a fan on it, and for the same price you can get a Z790 Aorus Elite AX, which would be closer to 15W of heat from the VRM which would be completely fine passive. 

[ewitte]

There are certain timings to avoid.  I believe this is the video which explains them.

 

 

 

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

Well, also bear in mind that I will put a power limit on the 13900K to something around 150-200W, to make the build powerful yet efficient.

Still not picked out an air cooler for the 13900K, since I'm a first time builder I was thinking of getting something that's easy to mount, but powerful enough and quiet. What air cooler would you guys put in if you were me, for a slightly power limited 13900K that I maybe unlimit later?

Regarding the MOBO itself, my initial choice was actually the MSI PRO Z790-A WiFi because it seemed quality with premium audio and stuff. I guess I can ask the same question as well here, which board would you pair with a 13900K and 4090 in this build? Doesn't feel right anymore to get a lower range board, probably should get something more premium. I know I definitely need PCIe 5.0 for the PSU because I wouldn't want to fiddle with the 4090 power adapter, and I heard that a PCIe 5.0 PSU doesn't need one.






 

[NukaColaEnjoyer]

7 minutes ago, ewitte said:

There are certain timings to avoid.  I believe this is the video which explains them.

 

 

 

Thanks, I'll check that out!

[RONOTHAN##]

31 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

Still not picked out an air cooler for the 13900K, since I'm a first time builder I was thinking of getting something that's easy to mount, but powerful enough and quiet. What air cooler would you guys put in if you were me, for a slightly power limited 13900K that I maybe unlimit later?

The AK620 seems to be the best performing air cooler, so it should be near the top of your list. 

 

33 minutes ago, NukaColaEnjoyer said:

Regarding the MOBO itself, my initial choice was actually the MSI PRO Z790-A WiFi because it seemed quality with premium audio and stuff. I guess I can ask the same question as well here, which board would you pair with a 13900K and 4090 in this build? Doesn't feel right anymore to get a lower range board, probably should get something more premium. I know I definitely need PCIe 5.0 for the PSU because I wouldn't want to fiddle with the 4090 power adapter, and I heard that a PCIe 5.0 PSU doesn't need one.

For the board, it's a bit complicated. It really depends on what you value in a motherboard. Personally I really like a POST code for easier debugging, but that pretty much doubles the amount you'll pay on a board for not many more features in return so if you think you can live without it it's best if you do. If I could live without it, the Aorus Elite would be my pick every day of the week, it's a great board for a pretty good price. If you really want to have one, going for a last gen Z690 board like a Carbon, Edge, Unify (X), or Master is also a good option, since they generally have better feature sets than their Z790 versions for some reason, though their memory support is definitely a little worse (though 2x32GB 6000 should be no problem on Z690 still). I'd take any of those boards, they'll all do a great job with that chip, and the specific choice would more come down to price than anything else. 

[Sibes991]

Ok so you need water with a 13900k even with my full custom EK waterloop with 3 360mm rads to cool the CPU and GPU, RTX 4090 EK waterblock front and back, I still sometimes have issues cooling the 13900k in CPU heavy workloads. A 4090 on air and a 13900k on air in a case is not going to end well

 

also if you are just going to undervolt the crap out of it to control its heat output just save the money and get a 13700k, its a waste to get the 13900k then cripple it