ram Ram choice for a ryzen 7

[sky99]

Hi all!

After a long time, i'm set to refresh my computer. I want to game at max settings (except for 4K, i don't care much for that).

I'm currently equiped with a phenom II X6 at a speed between 3 and 4 Ghz (i currently have the watercooling off, so it's more like 3.5),

with 16 gigs of DDR3, an R9 290, and SSDs. All in all i think that my old CPU is holding me back quite a bit, so i'm looking forward to upgrade on rizen

(had it not been cool, i would have switched to intel).

For the CPU i'm probably going for a R7 1700, and overclock the sh*t out of it.

I'll keep my R9 290 for now, since nothing can be bought without selling a kidney in this department, so now i'm left with memory choices.

 

Seeing how rizen loves higher speed memory (when it works!) i'm leaning towards DDR4 3000 or 3200, as it seems like the sweet spot in price/performance.

However i'd be happy to hear suggestions about this.

I'm not set yet on motherboard, but i'm interested in a few asus B350 (there is a fatality model if i recall correctly that has all the stuff i want), full ATX.

 

I'd start with 16Gigs at first, and later on upgrade with 16 more for 32 total.

The problem is that i've heard/read that 4 sticks of double bank ram is a no-go on rizen, so i'm considering my options now.

I can either start with a single 16 gig stick, but that's single channel for some months. Not cool performance wise.

the other option would be 2 8gig sticks, but how can i ensure that i'll get single bank sticks? how to be sure that i can later on add 2 more sticks?

 

Unless someone has more info on this single/dual bank memory stuff, and there is an update planned?

 

I think i want to spend 700€, perhaps up to 800€ for CPU+mainboard+ram, and cooler options can have a little extra, but i think i can reuse my waterblocks, pumps,

etc, i'll juste have to 3D print a fixation plate for the blocks i have.

That's around 1000-1200$CA or 800-900US$ that i can spend on that. If really i'm making a huge mistake with my choices, i can spend more, but i'd like not; i'd rather keep the money to later on buy a bad-ass GPU such as a 1080 when prices drop a bit.

 

So any insights?

[SquintyG33Rs]

you can find data sheets for any ram if you look up their part number. the important thing to be able to hit your rated speed is that it does so at CL14 or CL15 if you get CL16 3000 ram the xmp won't work.

Ryzen doesn't overclock all that much tbh.... you'll get to 3.9 maybe 4.0 with everything working but you won't get anything higher.

 

I don't have an answer to your double bank quad dimm versus single bank sorry.

[SquintyG33Rs]

i'm also saying with everything working because shit goes south when you're pushing the 4GHz with an xmp profile. your CPU might be able to do 4GHz but the memory controller could be the one losing stability and it has it's own voltage it's not as simple as overclocking intel that's for sure. intel is child's play

[sky99]

3 minutes ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

you can find data sheets for any ram if you look up their part number. the important thing to be able to hit your rated speed is that it does so at CL14 or CL15 if you get CL16 3000 ram the xmp won't work.

Ryzen doesn't overclock all that much tbh.... you'll get to 3.9 maybe 4.0 with everything working but you won't get anything higher.

 

I don't have an answer to your double bank quad dimm versus single bank sorry.

Thanks!
Do i care all that much about XMP? can't i just type in the settings and have it run at whatever?

i've read about 4Ghz, that's fine for me, and this is the reason why i'm going for a 1700 rather than the 1700x ,1800 or 1800x, all models seems capped at 4Ghz, so i'm betting on overclock.

I think that a 4Ghz 8 core ryzen should be enough for pretty much any game no? i mean, at that level, the GPU would more likely to be the limiting factor i think. 
And as for 3D renders and stuff, i think blender will love the ryden 8 core 16 threads over my old phenom II X6 ^^

[sky99]

4 minutes ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

i'm also saying with everything working because shit goes south when you're pushing the 4GHz with an xmp profile. your CPU might be able to do 4GHz but the memory controller could be the one losing stability and it has it's own voltage it's not as simple as overclocking intel that's for sure. intel is child's play

Well, you can desync the memory from the CPU speed nowadays isn't it? if this is something that has changed, i'll be really annoyed
But better to know now, and invest in higher quality ram, if so...

[cj09beira]

22 minutes ago, sky99 said:

 

try getting a board with bclk extended range support ( higher than 100mhz) it will help a lot in fine tunning your cpu and memory overclocks, at least for asus the cheapest that supports it is the x370-F gaming, and the gaming k5 also supports it (don't remember the brand)

[SquintyG33Rs]

6 minutes ago, sky99 said:

Well, you can desync the memory from the CPU speed nowadays isn't it? if this is something that has changed, i'll be really annoyed
But better to know now, and invest in higher quality ram, if so...

 

8 minutes ago, sky99 said:

Thanks!
Do i care all that much about XMP? can't i just type in the settings and have it run at whatever?

i've read about 4Ghz, that's fine for me, and this is the reason why i'm going for a 1700 rather than the 1700x ,1800 or 1800x, all models seems capped at 4Ghz, so i'm betting on overclock.

I think that a 4Ghz 8 core ryzen should be enough for pretty much any game no? i mean, at that level, the GPU would more likely to be the limiting factor i think. 
And as for 3D renders and stuff, i think blender will love the ryden 8 core 16 threads over my old phenom II X6 ^^

I bought mine for rendering primarily in C4D. XMP is basically a 1 click put all the settings in, it doesn't do any magic, it just has the working settings pre entered. if XMP doesn't work you're unlikely to find a working set of numbers. I've had success with only 1 ram kit  out of 4 on 1 out of 3 mobos running ram out of rated spec. so i don't see it as viable.

 

on ryzen you have 2 4core complexes that are connected byan "infinity fabric" bus that runs at ram speed. that's why it likes high speed ram. because with higher speed ram the cpu cross talk is also much faster. the speeds aren't really locked in sync tho so that's not a worry you need to have.

[SquintyG33Rs]

5 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

try getting a board with bclk extended range support ( higher than 100mhz) it will help a lot in fine tunning your cpu and memory overclocks, at least for asus the cheapest that supports it is the x370-F gaming, and the gaming k5 also supports it (don't remember the brand)

that's a good idea. couldn't have tested that I only worked with B350 boards.

[cj09beira]

1 minute ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

that's a good idea. couldn't have tested that I only worked with B350 boards.

manufactures should add that to some of the b350 boards, its such a simple feature that its really useful 

[DocSwag]

What are you doing with this pc? It sounds like it's just gaming in which case a 7700k would be better...

39 minutes ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

you can find data sheets for any ram if you look up their part number. the important thing to be able to hit your rated speed is that it does so at CL14 or CL15 if you get CL16 3000 ram the xmp won't work.

Ryzen doesn't overclock all that much tbh.... you'll get to 3.9 maybe 4.0 with everything working but you won't get anything higher.

 

I don't have an answer to your double bank quad dimm versus single bank sorry.

There are some cl15 3000 MHz kits that aren't b die out there.

 

Also that's not entirely accurate, it's not that cl16 3000 MHz ram won't work, it's just that it's less likely to since Ryzen likes b die and the b die kits are the 3000/3200 MHz cl14 kits.

[sky99]

17 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

try getting a board with bclk extended range support ( higher than 100mhz) it will help a lot in fine tunning your cpu and memory overclocks, at least for asus the cheapest that supports it is the x370-F gaming, and the gaming k5 also supports it (don't remember the brand)

That's interesting, i didn't know that. I was lead to think that X370 only added stuff for multi-GPU (i absolutely don't care about that). If the X370 has other added features, that's something i'll be looking for. For the mobo, i want M.2 slots, usb 3.1, and the usual stuff,  plus the things that will get me where i want. So bclk extended range support is something i'll look into (i have no idea of what it is, those ryzen bios are full of terms i've never seen before. Back in the days, you set your FSB to whatever, your multiplier to whatever was stable, and tried to have cas latency set to 2  now there are 20+ settings... Even on my old phenom II i had not that many stuff to set, or it wouldn't have a huge impact...)

11 minutes ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

 

I bought mine for rendering primarily in C4D. XMP is basically a 1 click put all the settings in, it doesn't do any magic, it just has the working settings pre entered. if XMP doesn't work you're unlikely to find a working set of numbers. I've had success with only 1 ram kit  out of 4 on 1 out of 3 mobos running ram out of rated spec. so i don't see it as viable.

 

on ryzen you have 2 4core complexes that are connected byan "infinity fabric" bus that runs at ram speed. that's why it likes high speed ram. because with higher speed ram the cpu cross talk is also much faster. the speeds aren't really locked in sync tho so that's not a worry you need to have.

Yes, i've read about the infinity fabric, and saw a video about that. The guy there explained that in heavily multithreaded, you could use higher latency settings to reach higher clock speed (so no ram write/read gain) but the inter package communications would speed up accordingly.

It's a shame that this can't be set independently of ram clock speed.

[DocSwag]

24 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

try getting a board with bclk extended range support ( higher than 100mhz) it will help a lot in fine tunning your cpu and memory overclocks, at least for asus the cheapest that supports it is the x370-F gaming, and the gaming k5 also supports it (don't remember the brand)

Does the K5 support it? I thought it didn't since the K7 has the external BCLK chip thing whereas the K5 doesn't.

 

Also it might not even matter once boards get bioses with agesa 1.0.0.6, which allows for OCing up to 4000 MHz without BCLK.

[cj09beira]

23 minutes ago, sky99 said:

That's interesting, i didn't know that. I was lead to think that X370 only added stuff for multi-GPU (i absolutely don't care about that). If the X370 has other added features, that's something i'll be looking for. For the mobo, i want M.2 slots, usb 3.1, and the usual stuff,  plus the things that will get me where i want. So bclk extended range support is something i'll look into (i have no idea of what it is, those ryzen bios are full of terms i've never seen before. Back in the days, you set your FSB to whatever, your multiplier to whatever was stable, and tried to have cas latency set to 2  now there are 20+ settings... Even on my old phenom II i had not that many stuff to set, or it wouldn't have a huge impact...)

Yes, i've read about the infinity fabric, and saw a video about that. The guy there explained that in heavily multithreaded, you could use higher latency settings to reach higher clock speed (so no ram write/read gain) but the inter package communications would speed up accordingly.

It's a shame that this can't be set independently of ram clock speed.

in simple terms:

normally cpu clock= 100 * K; K=[28...90]

so to get 4ghz you do 100*40

but with the additional range you can do things like 101 * 40

to get that little bit extra perf

edit: breaking news K can have a decimal point, upss 

[cj09beira]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

Does the K5 support it? I thought it didn't since the K7 has the external BCLK chip thing whereas the K5 doesn't.

 

Also it might not even matter once boards get bioses with agesa 1.0.0.6, which allows for OCing up to 4000 MHz without BCLK.

it does support, but the gaming 5 doesnt only the K5

agesa 1.0.0.6 helps but imagine he cant get 4ghz, without this he has to go with 3.9 while with this he can get 3950 or higher (at least try)

[DocSwag]

1 minute ago, cj09beira said:

it does support, but the gaming 5 doesnt only the K5

agesa 1.0.0.6 helps but imagine he cant get 4ghz, without this he has to go with 3.9 while with this he can get 3950 or higher (at least try)

I believe with Ryzen you can go in increments of 25 MHz  

 

Also seems I was wrong  I thought K5 didn't have it.

[cj09beira]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

I believe with Ryzen you can go in increments of 25 MHz  

 

Also seems I was wrong  I thought K5 didn't have it.

yaa. hm

its still usefull for memory oc though  

[SquintyG33Rs]

19 minutes ago, sky99 said:

That's interesting, i didn't know that. I was lead to think that X370 only added stuff for multi-GPU (i absolutely don't care about that). If the X370 has other added features, that's something i'll be looking for. For the mobo, i want M.2 slots, usb 3.1, and the usual stuff,  plus the things that will get me where i want. So bclk extended range support is something i'll look into (i have no idea of what it is, those ryzen bios are full of terms i've never seen before. Back in the days, you set your FSB to whatever, your multiplier to whatever was stable, and tried to have cas latency set to 2  now there are 20+ settings... Even on my old phenom II i had not that many stuff to set, or it wouldn't have a huge impact...)

Yes, i've read about the infinity fabric, and saw a video about that. The guy there explained that in heavily multithreaded, you could use higher latency settings to reach higher clock speed (so no ram write/read gain) but the inter package communications would speed up accordingly.

It's a shame that this can't be set independently of ram clock speed.

i can't be set independently for electrical reasons. the CPU possessing information highly depends on when it gets that information from the ram so unless you would add c separate chip to manage timings and thus introducing latency, lag and wait time you can't have them distinct. it would cripple performance even more than the 1 ALU for 2 cores that FX had.

[SquintyG33Rs]

3 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

I believe with Ryzen you can go in increments of 25 MHz  

 

Also seems I was wrong  I thought K5 didn't have it.

yeah that's just for CPU multiplier though RAM can't have it's own BLCK

[sky99]

16 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

it does support, but the gaming 5 doesnt only the K5

agesa 1.0.0.6 helps but imagine he cant get 4ghz, without this he has to go with 3.9 while with this he can get 3950 or higher (at least try)

OK, so that's a good thing to know, since i don't expect a significant difference between 3900 and 3950 ^^

By the way, i say 4Ghz, because it's a round number, but if i get 3.9 or even 3.8 i'll be happy with it...
I mean, at that point, not many CPUs exceed the processing power of this CPU, and i can't imagine that much processing power beeing needed in many games at 1080p...
As i said, i have a 4K monitor, but i use it at 1080p because of scaling issues, and multi-monitor problems otherwise (i also output on my TV, which is right next to the computer. Then when i play games that interests my girlfriend, she watches those on the TV, so i perform exclusive let's play for her  )

 

 

[DocSwag]

5 minutes ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

yeah that's just for CPU multiplier though RAM can't have it's own BLCK

Ram uses the same BCLK the CPU does.

[DocSwag]

OP, for ram the best you can get would be ram with Samsung b die as it works the best with Ryzen right now. That would be any ram kit that's 3000 or 3200 MHz that's cl14. They almost always can run at their rated frequency with Ryzen and OC well too.

[sky99]

1 hour ago, DocSwag said:

OP, for ram the best you can get would be ram with Samsung b die as it works the best with Ryzen right now. That would be any ram kit that's 3000 or 3200 MHz that's cl14. They almost always can run at their rated frequency with Ryzen and OC well too.

thanks, i'll look into this!

[sky99]

I can't find 3000 Mhz kits at CL14 that are not too expensive, however i found the Corsair Vengeance LPX Series Low Profile 16 Go (2x 8 Go) DDR4 3000 MHz CL15, which has an adequate pricing for my budget.

Any reason not to chose this ram?

 

I've also seen the Corsair Vengeance LED Series 16 Go (2x 8 Go) DDR4 3000 MHz CL15, that have similar specs but with lights. Not a big deal for me, but i wonder if the price upgrade comes from better memory chips or only the added leds?

[sky99]

I've been looking up, and found a great post on reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/62vp2g/clearing_up_any_samsung_bdie_confusion_eg_on/

Up there is a list, with product numbers, of the ram sticks that includes 8GB Samsung B-Dies, as well as single vs dual rank ram, and single vs dual face PCB.

 

So i think i'll spend more, and ensure that i get a single bank samsung B-Die, as mentioned earlier by @DocSwag earlier.

Now any preferences between GSkill RipJaws and Corsair Dominator? I guess that once the mem chips are soldered, there's not much difference, all those guys are probably using premium PCBs...

 

Anyway thanks for the advices (BTW, i think i found the reddit post on another answer you did on another thread, DocSwag...)

[DocSwag]

8 hours ago, sky99 said:

I've been looking up, and found a great post on reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/62vp2g/clearing_up_any_samsung_bdie_confusion_eg_on/

Up there is a list, with product numbers, of the ram sticks that includes 8GB Samsung B-Dies, as well as single vs dual rank ram, and single vs dual face PCB.

 

So i think i'll spend more, and ensure that i get a single bank samsung B-Die, as mentioned earlier by @DocSwag earlier.

Now any preferences between GSkill RipJaws and Corsair Dominator? I guess that once the mem chips are soldered, there's not much difference, all those guys are probably using premium PCBs...

 

Anyway thanks for the advices (BTW, i think i found the reddit post on another answer you did on another thread, DocSwag...)

Honestly, I would just pick based on looks . I don't think there should be any quality difference if the rated speeds are the same so whichever looks better in your opinion should be the one you choose.

 

EDIT: Outta curiosity, how far did you look to find me link that thread ? It's been ages since I've linked it...