Ryzen 5 Ram

[Inversion]

I'm looking to buy the Ryzen 5 1600 probably around Christmas this year or January next year. Of course for the last few months, there's been so much stuff saying "RYZEN NEEDS FAST RAM!!!!". How true is this? Is it worth spending the extra for 3200MHz RAM (2x4GB DDR4) or would it be worth just saving the extra £15 and buying 2400MHz RAM (1x8GB) I Don't even mind the number of sticks since the MOBO I'm looking at has 4 DIMM slots and I don't this I'll use more than 16 GB of RAM anytime soon. This upgrade is major since I'm going to new MOBO, CPU and RAM cause I have DDR3 at the minute. This stuff is gonna need to last at least 5 to 6 years.

[zzzzzzzhhh]

RAM speed, does it matter? No. Okay it matters, doesn't show a significant improvement though.

[Zando_]

8 minutes ago, Vespertine said:

RAM speed, does it matter? No. Okay it matters, doesn't show a significant improvement though.

Actually it does. Let me find the thread where a guy proved that...

[PCGuy_5960]

11 minutes ago, Vespertine said:

RAM speed, does it matter? No. Okay it matters, doesn't show a significant improvement though.

1. It does
2. It makes a huge difference with Ryzen

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Actually it does. Let me find the thread where a guy proved that...

I think @MageTank had posted it.....

[Zando_]

Just now, PCGuy_5960 said:

1. It does
2. It makes a huge difference with Ryzen

I think @MageTank had posted it.....

Here's @stealth80's excellent thread, he got a massive 35+ max fps boost in Rise of The Tomb Raider, going from 2133MHz to 3333MHz : 

 

 

[zzzzzzzhhh]

5 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Here's @stealth80's excellent thread, he got a massive 35+ max fps boost in Rise of The Tomb Raider, going from 2133MHz to 3333MHz : 

 

 

No offence, but that seems wayy too unreal to be true.

[Zando_]

8 minutes ago, Vespertine said:

No offence, 

None taken. 

8 minutes ago, Vespertine said:

but that seems wayy too unreal to be true.

It's because of the way Ryzen's Infinity Fabric works, binding multiple CPU 'nodes' or whatever together. It relies on a fast cache and RAM to send instructions between the CPU packages, AFAIK. I read somewhere a 1MHz increase in RAM speed is the same or better than a 1MHz increase in core clock. 

[bomerr]

8GB isn't enough for quite a few games nowadays especially if you have a tab of chrome open. 

[Inversion]

53 minutes ago, bomerr said:

8GB isn't enough for quite a few games nowadays especially if you have a tab of chrome open. 

Since my GPU is a GTX 960 and will be for some time, I don't run games on max or even high settings a lot of the time so the RAM usage isn't that high. 6GB usage is rare for me.

[stealth80]

2 hours ago, Vespertine said:

No offence, but that seems wayy too unreal to be true.

and why is that? That is max FPS. I did benchmarks from initial install all the way through every bios update to date and memory speeds at 3333mhz and 3.95ghz speed on the CPU, if you look at my "Temporal Snow Ryzen Refresh" build log below you can see the initial benchmarks were worse than the 4790k I upgraded from 

 

The average of the benchmark was from 88.1 FPS on initial bios and 2133mhz vs 99.79 with 3333mhz and bios F6F - these were at 1440P and a 1080 GTX at 2050mhz

 

I ran the same test at 1080P to try and be more CPU bound

 

 

and at 3333mhz

 

 

 

Ram makes a massive difference

[MageTank]

3 hours ago, Vespertine said:

No offence, but that seems wayy too unreal to be true.

It's true. It's also true for Intel. When you are I/O-Bound by the CPU, memory speed will directly impact how low your framerates dip in that scenario. The faster your ram, the less dramatic the dip. We see this impact the most in regards to minimum framerates, and have seen improvements of up to 10-20% depending on the title. For ryzen, the impact is far more dramatic, and even impacts average/max framerates to a pretty significant degree.

 

This is because on Ryzen, their CPU interconnect that talks between each CCX (Infinity Fabric) is directly tied to memory speed. The faster your memory is, the faster each of those CCX's get to talk to each other. There is a downside to this though. With that interconnect being directly tied to memory speeds, it makes it extremely difficult to alter your memory speed without severe consequences in regards to stability, or outright compatibility issues that prevent your system from posting. Because of this, you have to invest in validated memory kits for Ryzen, and specific motherboards designed to handle memory overclocking due to very specific trace topologies. Without this investment, memory overclocking becomes extremely difficult, even with a wealth of knowledge on the subject. 

 

4 hours ago, Inversion said:

I'm looking to buy the Ryzen 5 1600 probably around Christmas this year or January next year. Of course for the last few months, there's been so much stuff saying "RYZEN NEEDS FAST RAM!!!!". How true is this? Is it worth spending the extra for 3200MHz RAM (2x4GB DDR4) or would it be worth just saving the extra £15 and buying 2400MHz RAM (1x8GB) I Don't even mind the number of sticks since the MOBO I'm looking at has 4 DIMM slots and I don't this I'll use more than 16 GB of RAM anytime soon. This upgrade is major since I'm going to new MOBO, CPU and RAM cause I have DDR3 at the minute. This stuff is gonna need to last at least 5 to 6 years.

You should mind the number of sticks. Ryzen's memory controller is extremely picky. When you occupy more than 2 sticks, it activates a group of sub-timings known as DPC or (DIMMS Per Channel) timings. When having 2 DIMM's in a single channel, the IMC has to factor in those timings, which cause an abundant amount of stress on the IMC. This limits your clock speeds considerably. So much so, that 3200 kits outright don't even work when using 4 sticks vs 2. If you can afford to do so, always choose larger DIMM's in a 1DPC configuration. This would mean 2x4GB, 2x8GB, 2x16GB > 1/3/4x4GB, 1/3/4x8GB, and 1/3/4x16GB. Another thing to consider is memory ranks. Most 8GB and smaller sticks are single rank, which mean they lack rank interleaving. This means you suffer a bandwidth penalty in all regards (with copy being impacted the most) but you also get to avoid multi-rank tertiary timings. This means less stress on the IMC, meaning potentially higher clock speeds. You can offset the read/write bandwidth deficiency of single rank kits with that surplus of clock potential, but the copy speed will still suffer. For compatibility sake, I'd recommend you go for a 2x8GB kit, and avoid 16GB sticks when you can. Refer to your motherboards QVL sheet for information on which validated kits are multi-rank or single rank. Typically, multi-rank kits are labeled as DS or Dual Sided, with single rank sticks being labeled as SS or Single Sided.

 

If you need to save money, and absolutely cannot afford a validated high speed Ryzen kit, then buy the cheapest 2x8GB Ryzen-validated kit you can afford. This can be found by looking at your motherboards QVL sheet and buying the cheapest kit you can afford. After that, refer to my memory overclocking guide for information on how to overclock that kit manually. It will be difficult, but it will save you money as long as you invest the time into learning how to do it. The Ryzen section is not complete yet, but I am actively working on it and will be able to answer any questions you have in that thread. 

[Inversion]

17 hours ago, MageTank said:

It's true. It's also true for Intel. When you are I/O-Bound by the CPU, memory speed will directly impact how low your framerates dip in that scenario. The faster your ram, the less dramatic the dip. We see this impact the most in regards to minimum framerates, and have seen improvements of up to 10-20% depending on the title. For ryzen, the impact is far more dramatic, and even impacts average/max framerates to a pretty significant degree.

 

This is because on Ryzen, their CPU interconnect that talks between each CCX (Infinity Fabric) is directly tied to memory speed. The faster your memory is, the faster each of those CCX's get to talk to each other. There is a downside to this though. With that interconnect being directly tied to memory speeds, it makes it extremely difficult to alter your memory speed without severe consequences in regards to stability, or outright compatibility issues that prevent your system from posting. Because of this, you have to invest in validated memory kits for Ryzen, and specific motherboards designed to handle memory overclocking due to very specific trace topologies. Without this investment, memory overclocking becomes extremely difficult, even with a wealth of knowledge on the subject. 

 

You should mind the number of sticks. Ryzen's memory controller is extremely picky. When you occupy more than 2 sticks, it activates a group of sub-timings known as DPC or (DIMMS Per Channel) timings. When having 2 DIMM's in a single channel, the IMC has to factor in those timings, which cause an abundant amount of stress on the IMC. This limits your clock speeds considerably. So much so, that 3200 kits outright don't even work when using 4 sticks vs 2. If you can afford to do so, always choose larger DIMM's in a 1DPC configuration. This would mean 2x4GB, 2x8GB, 2x16GB > 1/3/4x4GB, 1/3/4x8GB, and 1/3/4x16GB. Another thing to consider is memory ranks. Most 8GB and smaller sticks are single rank, which mean they lack rank interleaving. This means you suffer a bandwidth penalty in all regards (with copy being impacted the most) but you also get to avoid multi-rank tertiary timings. This means less stress on the IMC, meaning potentially higher clock speeds. You can offset the read/write bandwidth deficiency of single rank kits with that surplus of clock potential, but the copy speed will still suffer. For compatibility sake, I'd recommend you go for a 2x8GB kit, and avoid 16GB sticks when you can. Refer to your motherboards QVL sheet for information on which validated kits are multi-rank or single rank. Typically, multi-rank kits are labeled as DS or Dual Sided, with single rank sticks being labeled as SS or Single Sided.

 

If you need to save money, and absolutely cannot afford a validated high speed Ryzen kit, then buy the cheapest 2x8GB Ryzen-validated kit you can afford. This can be found by looking at your motherboards QVL sheet and buying the cheapest kit you can afford. After that, refer to my memory overclocking guide for information on how to overclock that kit manually. It will be difficult, but it will save you money as long as you invest the time into learning how to do it. The Ryzen section is not complete yet, but I am actively working on it and will be able to answer any questions you have in that thread. 

Since I'm kinda stuck with my budget of about £80 max for ram then should I get 1 stick of 8GB at 3000MHz now and add another down the line, or get a 2x4GB now at 3200MHz and add another later?

[MageTank]

1 hour ago, Inversion said:

Since I'm kinda stuck with my budget of about £80 max for ram then should I get 1 stick of 8GB at 3000MHz now and add another down the line, or get a 2x4GB now at 3200MHz and add another later?

It would depend on how much later you want plan on upgrading. If it's within the next month or two, sure, a single 8GB stick will hold you off just fine, but if it's any longer, you may want to bite the bullet and get 2x4GB for dual channel. While the infinity fabric itself doesn't care about channel count (it only cares about specific DRAM speed), some applications scale tremendously with more memory bandwidth, and single channel literally cuts your theoretical bandwidth in half. Just be mindful of that if you ever think an application is running slower than it should.

[tim11111111]

On 7/3/2017 at 11:28 AM, Vespertine said:

RAM speed, does it matter? No. Okay it matters, doesn't show a significant improvement though.

 

For CPU intensive games, it really does. Even with a Mid tier 1060 3gb gpu, the difference is substantial.

 

 

 

[Inversion]

18 hours ago, MageTank said:

It would depend on how much later you want plan on upgrading. If it's within the next month or two, sure, a single 8GB stick will hold you off just fine, but if it's any longer, you may want to bite the bullet and get 2x4GB for dual channel. While the infinity fabric itself doesn't care about channel count (it only cares about specific DRAM speed), some applications scale tremendously with more memory bandwidth, and single channel literally cuts your theoretical bandwidth in half. Just be mindful of that if you ever think an application is running slower than it should.

What sort of things benefit from the greater bandwidth. Is gaming affected greatly? What at about video editing?

[MageTank]

5 hours ago, Inversion said:

What sort of things benefit from the greater bandwidth. Is gaming affected greatly? What at about video editing?

For Ryzen? Yes, gaming is impacted quite significantly. Gamers Nexus did a video on it, in which a stock Ryzen CPU with just it's memory overclocked, performed just as well as if you took the CPU from stock, to 3.9ghz. It's just as significant as a CPU overclock on that platform. When combining both, it is capable of trading blows with Intel's i5.

 

As for video editing, I am not really certain as I have not seen people bench ram in regards to video editing. I have seen it help with CAD related software though, if that is any indication.

[RadiatingLight]

34 minutes ago, MageTank said:

When combining both, it is capable of absolutely crushing Intel's i5.

FTFY

[MageTank]

Just now, RadiatingLight said:

FTFY

Not entirely. Games that do not leverage the additional threads, such as MMO's and MOBA's, care only about how fast your cores are. So clock speed/IPC is king for those. I've tested this in Guild Wars 2 (arguably one of the hardest games to obtain a high framerate in) and while Ryzen still showed impressive results, it was still a dozen frames behind even a modestly clocked 4.5ghz 6600k. 

 

Granted, I OC ram on every platform, and my Intel platform can do much higher memory clock speeds than Ryzen (due to the nature of it's IMC). I suppose I should run a "pseudo-fair" comparison at similar clock speeds. The most difficult part is, trying to slow Intel's latency down to match Ryzens, lol.