Ryzen 5000 DDR4 Memory Performance, XMP vs Manual Timings, Single vs Dual Rank

[Music] welcome back to harvard unboxed today we're looking at ddr4 memory performance with the new ryzen 5000 series because that's pretty much all anyone is asking for at the moment but before we go in search of zen 3's memory sweet spot there are a few other things that i'd like to talk about and the first order of business is two modules versus four modules a topic recently brought up by gamersnexus now just to be clear before i continue i have no issue with the gn video this isn't shotsfiredgn i am friends with steve we talk regularly and we actually spoke shortly after his video went live what i'd like to do here is provide a little more information some more context perhaps as to what this means in the amd versus intel battle because a lot of people seem to have misunderstood the testing and i guess without representation of zen 2 and comet lake cpus that is easy enough to do coming away from that video many viewers as evidenced by the comments section on our recent ryzen 5 5600x review they took the gn findings to mean that amd zen 3 processors were much faster relative to competing processors when using four memory modules opposed to having just two and frankly that is just not the case this is something we'd actually investigated quite recently 11 months ago now in fact when i compared the core i9 9900k and ryzen 9 3 100 x using two eight gigabyte modules versus four four gigabyte modules using the exact same memory timings i found one using rather slow ddr4 3000 cl 16 memory that we were almost always looking at a three to five percent performance uplift for the average frame rate at 1080p using an rtx 2080 ti but also gains as high as 10 when looking at the one percent low results and this was seen with both the amd and intel processors certainly not massive gains but as i said this is relatively slow memory and i expected that the margins would grow a little bit with faster memory but before we jump into my updated testing here's a very brief explanation as to why four sticks can be faster than 2. it boils down to how the memory is configured or rather the memory rank for those of you unaware the term rank means the number of 64-bit memory banks on a module most consumer grade memory features a single rank though higher capacity modules are usually dual rank while server grade memory is often quad rank identifying if your memory is dual or single rank can be difficult as software doesn't always read modules correctly and not all memory manufacturers note the rank in their module's id typically single rank modules feature all the memory chips on one side of the pcb while dual rank memory places chips on both sides of the pcb however that's not always the case a module with chips on both sides of the pcb is really just dual sided and can still be a single ranked module so it is a bit confusing where things get even more confusing is when you introduce more memory sticks or modules a system populated with more than two single rank modules will actually act as if dual rank modules are installed in fact there is very little difference between one dual rank module and two single rank modules when connected to the same memory controller even though the memory chips reside on different pcbs so when using two single ranked modules for dual rank operation the memory is configured as a single rank however when using four single rank modules for dual channel operation the memory is now configured as dual rank this can give the four dimm module configuration an advantage as it allows several open dram pages in each rank although the ranks can't be accessed simultaneously they can be accessed independently and this means the controller can send right data to one rank while it waits for the read data previously selected from another rank and as you'll see soon this greatly increases memory bandwidth how much of an impact this has on performance depends on the application and the memory controller's ability to take advantage of open pages but what all this means is yes it is possible for four modules to improve performance over two modules in a dual channel system okay so using the geforce rtx 3090 here is how the ryzen 950 900x ryzen 9 3900x and core i9 10900k compare with two ddr4 3200 modules versus four ddr4 3200 modules all using the exact same timings i've only tested with two games here as that's really all the data we need to clear up any misconceptions you might have regarding four sticks with zen 3 versus other cpus testing was shut off the tomb raider which is a very cpu demanding game we find that the 3900x saw a 14 increase in the average frame rate when going from two modules to four and that's a very significant improvement though note we are using an extreme gpu at a low resolution anyway moving to the core i9 10900k we again see a big performance uplift by using four sticks this time a 15 performance boost now with the ryzen 9 5900x we're looking at a very similar performance increase this time 12 and it's possible we're starting to run into a gpu limitation here as ampere scales quite poorly at 1080p but the point is all three cpus see a similar double-digit performance uplift with four sticks so this isn't some kind of special feature that's unique to zen3 hitman 2 is another cpu memory sensitive game though it's kind of a weird title anyway that doesn't really matter and since we are looking to be gpu bound with the 5900x let's focus on the 1 low data for this comparison with the 3900x we're looking at an 8 performance increase with 4 sticks however using the 10-100k that shows a far more significant 29 percent performance increase though it's only a 13 increase for the average frame rate like i said hitman 2 is a bit of an oddity and i suspect with the 3100x we're looking at a performance bottleneck that's more related to the quarter call latency rather than dram performance anyway with the 5900x we're also witnessing a massive increase in one percent low performance with four sticks this time a 21 performance boost but again i think we're running into a gpu limitation for the average frame rate but the point is here the 10 900k and 5900x see a similar increase to performance with four memory modules so not a feature that's unique to zen3 okay so moving on it's now time to check out how the zen3 architecture behaves using different memory modules frequencies and timings and once again i will be using the rtx 3090 for this next batch of results but i do have some data with slower gpus to go over later in the video now at this point in time none of my ryzen 5000 series processors work with a 2 000 megahertz fclk which does limit me to using ddr4 3800 memory well i can use faster memory but not at a one-to-one ratio apparently there will be new biases that make the 2000 megahertz fclk more likely though i have tried one of said bios's and it didn't help in my case the good news being though that all of the cpus did work at 1900 megahertz and that certainly wasn't the case with my zen 2 processors with some working but most not limiting them to 1800 megahertz as the maximum fclk now for much of this testing i've used g skills triton z 3600 cl 14 memory which i manually tuned raising the cl to 16 but aggressively tightening the secondary and tertiary timings which does massively improve performance for all ryzen processors when heavily cpu limited this configuration will be tested at ddr4 4000 3800 3600 and then an underclocked 3000 configuration as well i've also included some stock xmp memory configurations as well one using corsair's dominator platinum rgb ddr4 3600 cl 18 1919 memory and another using a data's xpg spectrex d50 ddr4 3600 cl18 2020 but with two different configurations one using two dual rank modules and the other using two single rank modules i'm also including our g skill trident z ddr4 3200cl 14 four times eight gigabyte test configuration used in our reviews and i'll also add in a two times eight gigabyte configuration as well for single rank testing i've also done my best to label this data in the graphs and i get that for some of you it will be a little bit confusing but you are free to pause at any point to get your bearings finally i'm sticking with the ryzen 9 5900x though please note these results apply to all zen3 processors even the ryzen 5 5600x okay so first up we have death stranding a game where the zen 3 processors went like a bat out of hell and despite that this isn't a particularly memory sensitive title for example if you compare our review configuration using 4 ddr4 3200 cl 14 memory modules cranking the memory up to 3800 with tightly tuned memory timings only boosted performance by 3fps so a 1.3 increase moreover we're only looking at a 7 to 10 percent difference between the fastest and slowest memory configurations tested which really isn't that significant it also looks like at least in this title that dual rank ddr4 3600 cl 18 memory is comparable to our dual rank ddr4 3200 cl 14 test configuration moving on to f1 2020 here we're again seeing very little in the way of a performance uplift over our test system configuration which is marked as orange on the graph when using manually tuned ddr4 3800 memory this time we're seeing just a 5 performance discrepancy between the fastest and slowest memory configurations tested therefore f1 2020 is another game that isn't particularly sensitive to memory performance okay so we know from previous testing that far cry new dawn is a memory sensitive game particularly latency sensitive and here we're seeing quite a notable 12 performance game with the tuned ddr4 3800 memory over our 3200 test configuration that said if we take the same 3800 spec but just increase the frequency to ddr4 4000 which right now in the absence of 2000 megahertz fclk support decouples from a one to one ratio with the infinity fabric and doing so actually breaks performance a little bit dropping down to the tuned 3600 spec horizon zero dawn like f1 2020 and death stranding isn't particularly sensitive to memory as here we're again looking at just a five percent difference between the fastest and slowest memory used there's also little to no difference between single and dual rank memory configurations in this title yet another game that isn't heavily influenced by memory performance is rainbow six siege in fact here we're looking at less than a two percent performance discrepancy between the fastest and slowest memory tested so not much else to talk about here really memory performance does make a reasonable difference in watchdog's legion here we're looking at a six percent performance increase by just adding two more ddr4 3200 modules and we see by overclocking and tuning the memory that performance was increased by a further three percent certainly not something that will prove beneficial at the higher more gpu limited resolutions but it is a measurable difference when testing with a cpu limited scenario as seen earlier hitman 2 is very memory and cpu intensive and here shooting up your memory can make quite a big difference though again that will only be the case when performance is cpu limited here we're seeing the performance using the stock ddr4 3600 cl 18 kits like the corsair dominated platinum rgb or a data xpg spectrix d50 in a single rank configuration it's pretty horrible relative to what we see with the dual rank or manually tuned configurations quite shockingly we're looking at around a 23 reduction in one percent low performance also if we look at the ddr4 3200 configurations using two and four sticks we see that our forced configuration would be up to 17 slower if we removed two of the modules we're also seeing the spectrex d50 16 gigabyte ddr4 3600 modules offering a nice performance boost as they were six percent faster than our 3200 cl-14 test configuration and again this is dual rank memory so the power of dual rank operation is strong here and unfortunately i was not able to test the manually tuned ddr4 3800 configuration in a dual rank mode as i don't have enough of those modules so in hitman with the memory at or above the 3200 spec we're seeing up to a 21 difference in performance and up to a 12 increase over our test configuration that said if we increase the resolution of 1440p the 21 margin seen previously at 1080p is reduced to 14 which is still quite a big margin but it is heavily reduced by increasing the gpu load moreover whereas the manually tuned ddr4 3800 memory was 12 percent faster than our ddr4 3200 test configuration at 1080p here at 1440p it's just four percent faster still as you can see dual rank memory does make a huge difference in this title like hitman 2 shuttle of the tomb raider is a very cpu demanding game that's also very sensitive to memory performance looking at our test configuration we see that using four of these trident z ddr4 3200 cl 14 memory modules improved performance by a whopping 12 percent when compared to just two modules it's also faster than the single ranked ddr4 3600 cl18 configuration as well and we're looking at similar performance from the a data xpg spectrox d50 32 gigabyte ddr4 3600 kit and of course that performance uplift isn't due to the extra capacity but rather the dual rank configuration beyond that though we're not really gaining much with the manually tuned ddr4 3600 and 3800 memory i also ran some 1440p tests was shut off the tomb raider and this is what i believe you can expect to see in most games even with something as extreme as an rtx 3090 whereas we did see a 19 difference between the fastest and slowest tested configurations at 1080p 1440p that margin is reduced to just four percent and with memory running at or above the amd based spec we're talking about just a 0.7 difference now if we average the 1080p data seen across the eight games tested this paints a pretty clear picture of the kind of performance differences you can typically expect to see with an extreme gpu at a lowest resolution so in more cpu limited gaming scenarios a manually tuned ddr4 3800 configuration will net you around seven percent more performance when compared to a stock memory kit like the corsair dominator platinum rgb for example when compared to our review setup we're looking at just a three percent boost on average and for those of you wondering here's a look at the memory bandwidth performance of these various memory configurations although the performance of ddr4 4000 was quite average given we couldn't run at a 2000 megahertz fclk the bandwidth is still very impressive sustaining 55 gigabytes per second the manually tuned ddr4 3800 memory managed 53 gigabytes per second which wasn't that much faster than the a data spectrix 32 gigabyte kit which achieved almost 52 gigabytes per second our test configuration was good for almost 47 gigabytes per second which is about the most you can hope for from ddr4 3200 memory running in a dual channel configuration now here's why the 55 gigabyte ddr4 4000 configuration didn't dominate the gaming benchmarks the latency is rather unimpressive at 60 nanoseconds and that's only marginally better than our ddr4 3200 test setup the manually tuned ddr4 3800 memory reduced dram latency by nine percent hence why it did so well in memory sensitive titles such as hitman 2 far cry new dawn and shadow of the tomb raider speaking of hitman 2 here's a look at memory frequency scaling so we're using the same memory and timings with the only changes being made to the memory frequency and the fclk which has been kept at a one-to-one ratio for optimal performance with the exception of the ddr4 4000 configuration for reasons just mentioned in hitman 2 we see fairly consistent scaling as the memory bandwidth and or latency is improved right up to ddr4 3800 i expect if we could get a 2 000 megahertz fclk working you'd see a further 3 boost for the ddr4 4000 configuration shutoff of the tomb raider is a little more in line with other demanding titles and here we find that ddr4 3600 is the sweet spot and this was the case with zen 2 as well so for those of you wanting as much performance as possible without going overboard on memory prices in my estimation ddr4 3600 cl16 looks like the way to go but wait there is more here's a look at the same memory configuration just seen in the scaling benchmarks with the rtx 3090 redone again but this time with an rtx 2070 super as you can see even in hitman at 1080p with an rtx 2070 super you're going to be almost entirely gpu bound and if you happen to be gaming at 1440p you'll be entirely gpu bound and no matter how much money you spend on your memory or how many modules you have performance is going to be much the same and we see exactly the same thing and shut off the tomb raider even at 1080p we're looking at equivalent performance across the board due to a strong gpu bottleneck and the 2070 supers no slouch we're talking about radeon rx 5700 xt light performance here so a very solid mid-range gpu of course increasing the resolution only neutralizes the results further and now it doesn't matter if you're running ddr4 2800 or 3800 performance will be very much the same even in a cpu demanding title so in conclusion if you're just a gamer wanting to maximize performance if and when you'll run into any sort of cpu limited situations and you really just want the maximum bang for your buck then i do recommend getting ddr for 3600 cl 16 memory and for the most part i suspect 16 gigabytes will be fine but if you can't afford it of course 32 gigabytes is a nice luxury to have and it means if you purchase two 16 gigabyte kits you'll also have the advantage of dual ranked operation right now something like crucial's ballistic 16 gigabyte ddr4 3600 cl 16 kit looks like a great deal as it costs just 75 us and should you want to they will offer a high degree of tunability g-skill also offers an affordable rip jaws ddr4 3600 cl 16 kit for around 80 us now assuming that i was able to get a 2 000 megahertz fclk working and perhaps i will be able to with future boss revisions i really don't think it's worth spending over 100 us on those kits chances are you'll never spot the difference namely because there probably won't be a difference so that stuff should really be reserved for overclockers wanting to get bigger 3d mark scores or whatever leaderboard it is that gets them excited these days as for the two sticks versus four sticks thing yeah look nothing new to report on since our testing 11 months ago the performance uplift for zen 3 is no different to that of zen 2 or competing intel processors at least in games some games will favor them three more while others intel just the way it is the margins also depend on the quality settings used and of course the hardware so if you lower the quality settings in these games you're going to exaggerate the margins further and that does get you further away from reality for most gamers i realize that most of you will just install your memory and get gaming and frankly unless you enjoy playing around this stuff spending hours tuning and tinkering with memory timings for what likely will amount to very little or potentially even no reward gains it's just a waste of time this is important stuff for us reviewers trying to conduct scientific testing and sometimes we do get a bit carried away with isolating a specific component in order to see what the performance differences might be but it really is important to remind viewers that for the most part they're unlikely to see these gains under realistic gaming conditions so keep that in mind anyway that is going to do it for this one if you appreciated this video give it one of those the like thing you can also subscribe for more content we'll have an ipc video coming up soon and then there's some new gpus just around the corner also if you'd like to become part of the harbor and box community join us over on patreon or floatplane links for those are in the video description floatplane now gives you early access to our content this video would have gone up earlier on floatplane uh basically we can do that because there's no youtube algorithm thing to worry about so we don't have to upload at regular intervals so anyway that's a nice feature for those wanting to sign up on floatplane alternatively we have patreon as well but yeah you can decide which one of those you want to use and yeah i'll leave that to you guys if you are interested but as i said that is going to do it for this one so i would like to thank you very much for watching this video i'm your host steve and i'll see you again next time [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 333,037

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: AGux0pANft0

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheBigJizzle]

I don't know what video you guys have watched, but form what I saw there is still a big difference even in up to 1440p in some cases. Look at the hitman 2 1440p results :

3600 cl18 single rank (110/152) vs dual rank (135/165).

3200 cl14 single rank (112/154) vs dual rank (129/161)

This is the results at stock timings. This is quite a big difference. The only thing that this video shows is that hand tuned up to tertiary timing is as fast as bone stock dual rank. Most people will use stock settings. It matters a lot, that's 23% increase in the minimum fps for 3600 cl18.

How some of you came to the conclusion that it does not matter is beyond me, you got the data showing clearly that in some case if you don't manually set the timing (most cases), it makes a big difference, specially in 1080p where most still play. Like, this video is terrible from HUB, the question we had at the beginning was how much of a difference is there between single and dual rank memory. The video we end up watching is talking about manually tuned single rank memory vs stock dual rank, Apple to oranges.

[u/Doubleyoupee]

Why no Dual rank 3800 1:1 results?

Now the single rank results top the charts...

[u/Zamp_AW]

I am still amazed how this is surprising, DR memory was always known to perform better because it allows more access and thus reduces idle cycles. Why is everyone suprised now and acting like it's the best thing since sliced bread?

But I guess that explains all those stupid 2x8GB memory recommendations. bEcAuSe iT oVeRcLoCkS bEtTeR, while it also performs worse than lower clocked dual rank memory.

I swear the majority of techtubers are joke.

[u/Justify_Chandru]

Bottomline:-

For 1080p: Gaming on some CPU intensive games the 2*Dual Rank or 4*Single Rank options offers better performance.

For 1440p & higher: No difference in gaming and the performance difference is negligible and shows only when using high end GPU.

So i would recommend Crucial Ballistix 2*8GB Micron Rev E kit and overclock to 3600 with 1800 on FCLK, after the bios updates from MOBO's depending on your FCLK (2000 ~ 2100) overclock your sticks. The sticks are cheap and recommended by buildzoid and many others for the price and its overclocking potential.

[u/InvincibleBird]

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Welcome back to Hardware Unboxed
• 04:02 - AMD vs. Intel, Single vs. Dual Rank
• 06:12 - Test Setup
• 08:24 - Death Stranding
• 09:05 - F1 2020
• 09:31 - Far Cry New Dawn
• 10:05 - Horizon Zero Dawn
• 10:22 - Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
• 10:36 - Watch Dogs Legion
• 10:59 - Hitman 2
• 12:48 - Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• 13:55 - 8 Game Average
• 14:27 - AIDA64 Memory
• 15:28 - DDR4 Frequency Scaling
• 16:21 - RTX 2070 Super Benchmarks
• 17:18 - Final Thoughts

[u/WDZZxTITAN]

So I got the TridentZ Neo 2x16GB - 32GB Kit from G.Skill, that's at 3600MHz CL16 timing 16-19-19-39.

I don't know if the sticks are DR or not, but if they are, am I ok in memory intensive games, or should I get a 4x8 kit? I am so confused

[u/TheOne320]

What they forgot to test is 2x dual rank. That should have similar performance to 4x single rank.

[u/NullDev42]

Why were none of the dual ranked configurations "tuned"? I understand that tuning 4 sticks of single ranked 8GB RAM can be a challenge, but tuning 2 sticks of 2x16GB dual ranked B-die RAM should be doable.

[u/dervu]

Why noone benchmarks CSGO with memory changes? Eh