The Best Memory for AMD Ryzen - A Beginner's Guide to RAM Performance

so it's been a little over a month since the ryzen 5000 series cpus have launched and i think it's fair to say that they're pretty amazing and in super high demand every model is sold out absolutely everywhere but unlike those amd gpus at least these processors have been restocked semi-regularly anyways with every new processor release there's always something new to learn and discover and in this video we're going to focus on what you should look for in a memory kit that's going to be paired with a zen 3 cpu and yes i know there are a lot of these around but our intent here is to approach this as a guide for newcomers this isn't meant to point out a single kit and say hey that's the best but rather you know guide you through to making a more informed decision and that means to walk you through explaining the effect of three main things memory ranks latency and frequency and what each of those things means of course there's also a few other technical things like infinity fabric frequency limits and overclocking along with some of the speed bumps that you can expect along the way there's also a few shout outs that i need to make too first of all i want to thank crucial for helping us out with this video even though the advice that we're going to be giving you guys can be made for pretty much any memory kids out there they did supply us with a ton of different combinations for more apples to apples testing this was also a whole team effort as well mike myself and patrick sunken over 200 hours of time into this and we learned a lot of things and we're really excited to share our findings with you guys it is finally here your screen enemies are not ready listen to this the new steel series air rox 3 wireless and wired mice super lightweight for deleting heads and cool shell design too super mesh usb c cable with fast charging insane battery life up to 200 hours dual wireless connection for flexibility the mouse is ip54 rated for water and dust resistance the truemove sensor is incredible with switches of up to 80 million clicks i mean come on give the hand what it wants check out the new steel series air aux 3 mice down below the first thing i really want to talk about is the memory kits that crucial sent our way for this video because i'll be referencing them a lot the standard ballistics lineup comes with either rgb that's controlled with your motherboard software or with a plain you know heat sprayer personally i prefer the stealth looks of the standard non-rgb modules that also come in three different heat spreader colors like white black or red these are available in speeds up to 3 600 megahertz right now and represent the more affordable options in crucial signup and then there's the ballistic max series and i'm sure you've seen me using them in a bunch of builds lately they're matte black non-eliminated look are just perfect for blending in with pretty much any build and they're fast too with 32 gigabyte kits hitting 4 400 megahertz mark and that's important for this video since it'll give us a chance to test at lower frequencies but much tighter timings now since crucial and micron their parent company are able to control pretty much all aspects of dram production these kits can be tuned from the ground up for some pretty unique creations they've also been able to bin memory chips which allows for the creation of kits like this right now this is one of the fastest memory kits on the planet running at 5 100 megahertz and later in this video we're gonna push the amd platform to the max with it but the bigger question is will it make much of a difference now speaking of the platform we're going to talk about a well-known and subtle topic that some crazy reason people seem to be rediscovering with ryzen 5000 and that's single rank versus dual rank memory modules but let's start with explaining what rank actually is to put it super simply a rank is a group of memory chips that are all physically linked together and that can all be accessed at the same time together you see this memory stick these eight memory chips are all grouped together in a single rank and if i flip the memory over there are no memory chips on the other side therefore this is a single sided single rank memory stick on the other hand a standard dual rank memory module would have chips on both sides with each side forming its own grouped rank right now the majority of ddr4 kits follow a pretty basic rule eight gigabyte sticks are single sided and single rank and 16 gigabytes and higher sticks are dual sided and dual rank but i hate to say this there are a few very minor exceptions for example crucial has transitioned all of their high-speed ballistics max 32 gigabyte kits to single rank in order to push their frequencies now i wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers started doing the same thing but we'll just have to wait and see now if you want to know the rank count on your current memory kit just open cpu-z click on the sbd tab and ranks are listed right over there now why is this all important well ever since the launch of the first gen ryzen processors memory ranks has been a topic of discussion in a way that never happened on the intel side the reason being first gen and second gen ryzen cpus had pretty weak memory controllers these older ryzen cpus handled single rank memory and two modules being installed pretty well but not high speed dual rank modules or other setups and that led to highly clocked single rank ddr4 performing better than lower clocked dual rank ddr4 on early ryzen systems and this is where the legend that dual rank memory was bad with all ryzen cpus got started now thankfully nowadays the ryzen 5000 series processors have very strong memory controllers so they can handle dual rank memory kits that are clocked as high as your infinity fabric or even your motherboard can handle i hope that all made sense now the reason why dual rank is faster is very simple ram or random access memory only does two things it's accessed and it's refreshed and one memory rank can only handle one of those operations per cycle however when a single stick has two ranks one rank can be accessed while the other is being refreshed and this is called rank interleaving and obviously being able to run two operations per cycle instead of just one leads to performance benefits but that increase isn't universal and some apps see significant gains while others see almost none at all and i'll be showing you that in just a bit now the main point is that most cpus perform best when their memory controller has access to two ranks per memory controller channel or four ranks in total now this can either be done with two dual rank modules or you can achieve the same rank interleaving by using four single rank modules now there is a problem with this on a few fronts though if for example you buy four single rank sticks you've already maxed out the available motherboard slots it's also usually more expensive to buy four eight gigabyte sticks rather than two 16 gigabyte once so what kind of performance differences can you expect between the various rand configurations well that's where we're going to jump into our benchmark results momentarily but first here is our test system we're using a ryzen 9 5950x but the results can be carried over into other cpus as well as for the other items there's an rtx 3090 to try to eliminate gpu bottlenecks as well now this config will be used for all of the benchmarks you see in this video and here's the various rank configurations that we tested and all of these were done with the timings of 16 16 16 16 36 1t and all the way from a single eight gigabyte module to four eight gigabyte modules and two dual rank 16 gigabyte dimms crucial also hooked us up with a few pretty rare 16 gigabytes single rank memory modules now while they are in common right now like i said i'm pretty sure we'll start to see them as memory speeds increase now starting off with adobe premiere's media encoder sees its biggest performance improvements going from a single eight gigabyte module to two modules and again from uh 16 gigabytes to 32 gigabytes there's a very small jump going from single ranked 16 gigabyte modules to dual rank but it's there in blender there was zero difference between a single eight gigabyte module installed and 32 gigabytes worth of single rank 16 gigabyte modules which is likely due to this being a super cpu intensive app but again we saw an improvement going to dual rank per memory channel with the 32 gigabyte dual rank kit and four eight gigabyte modules autodesk maya rendering tightens up the race even more with all the results being well within the margin of error one thing i do want to mention here is that while rendering isn't impacted by a small 8 gigabyte memory footprint 3d orbiting of high resolution models becomes almost impossible in handbrake transcoding there's a clear step down in performance going with single rank hits and of course a massive penalty for going with a single channel populated finally winrar is a super memory intensive program but the difference between single and dual rank layouts is massive the gaming results are also pretty interesting too so it's obvious going with a single channel layout is a big mistake and using dual rank modules or four by eight gigabyte layout can have benefits in some titles on the other hand dual 2 single rank will only net you a few percentage points difference most of the time so with this first step done it's pretty obvious that some programs benefit a lot from going with dual rank modules or populating all four memory slots but other apps don't see nearly as much of a performance uplift but as often as possible we'd still recommend sticking to dual rank layouts since they're consistently better in pretty much majority of situations if even only by a few percentage points if i'm being perfectly honest the next step in all of this is timings and latency the new zen 3 architecture brought a bunch of physical changes to the cpu die and the most important of which is the new unified cache that has up to eight cores and can access all at once or that one core can have full access of the result of this new structure is a serious reduction in cache and memory latency compared to zen 2. the memory latency improvements happened even though the memory controller hasn't changed at all compared to the previous generation in the most simple terms the data has less hoops to jump through and with automatic reduction in memory latency the big question is do these ryzen 5000 cpus actually still benefit from using lower latency ram and is there now a point of diminishing returns when it comes to tighter timings well let's find out since we've already established that 2 by 16 gigabyte dual ram kits achieves the best performance so we're going to stick to that and then we're going to lock it to ddr4 3600 and then test a bunch of timings it used to be that latency meant a lot when it came to hitting the best performance but for the most part with zen 3 going from tight cl 14 timings to cl20 actually nets very little in real world benchmarks a lot of this is likely due to amd's ultra fast and heavily upgraded cache design gaming on the other hand does see some small frame rate bumps with these tighter timings but those are mostly focused on one percent lows rather than overall averages so what does this all mean well there's still a performance benefit when using lower latency ram but not all that much relative to what you're gonna be paying for with a kid with super tight timings plus it's getting a lot harder to find memory with true low timings these days plus chasing lower latencies might prevent you from hitting the ddr4 3600 to ddr4 3732 memory speeds that's still the sweet spot uh just like they were found on zen 2. now you might be saying hold on i thought that there was an improvement this generation and then a 2 000 megahertz infinity fabric and ddr4 4000 were supposed to be easy why are you still using ddr4 3600 and 3733 as a sweet spot well that's just not the case at least not yet and maybe not ever but to understand why i need to talk about the ratios and what the one-to-one ratio mode is and why it's so important on the ryzen platform you see on ryzen 5000 just like ryzen 3000 the memory clock infinity fabric clock and the memory controller clock are all automatically locked in a synchronous one to one to one ratio from ddr4 2133 all the way up to ddr4 3600. now past that point those three frequencies are no longer synchronized the infinity fabric is set to 1800 megahertz and the memory controller ends up running at half the memory speed and when this happens you get a memory latency penalty of about 15 which means a big hit on performance in many situations now many of you watching this right now with ryzen 3000 systems and overclocked memory are probably smashing into this same problem without even knowing it and an easy way to verify this is to download zen timings and i'll make sure to link that down below you basically have to check out the top right corner the mclk is the memory frequency the fclk is the infinity fabric frequency and the uclk is the memory controller frequency if they aren't all at exactly the same frequency then you're leaving performance on the table and by the way we always use the one to one to one ratio rule because it's simple to understand and it gives extremely good performance in a wide range of workloads but as with everything memory related there's tons of exceptions and extreme configurations thankfully pushing above ddr4 3600 you can manually adjust both the memory controller and the infinity fabric frequencies back in line at a speed of 37 30 megahertz and above now head over into the amd cbs menu load up the xfr enhancement adjust the fabric clock so it aligns and finally make sure the uclk of memory controller frequency lines up as well 37 30 megahertz at one to one should be relatively easy on most cpus but above that point it gets a lot more challenging and speaking of challenges we've achieved infinity fabric speeds of 2000 megahertz and above with one-to-one memory speeds of ddr4 4000 and even higher many times our 5800x hit 2000 megahertz at ddr4 4000 flat the second 5800x hit 2100 megahertz and ddr4 4200 and our 5950x hit 20 33 megahertz at ddr 4066. all of those were very low and safe 24x7 voltages and that's fantastic and something that was impossible on previous zen cpus but look my job is to make sure we offset cool numbers with a healthy dose of reality now our team has access to the very best motherboards like the rog crosshair 8 dark hero and the gigabyte x570 aorus master both of those motherboards have received special attention from amd and have been fine-tuned for ryzen 5000. your average b550 or x570 motherboard will simply not hit these numbers right now and most lower end motherboards that we've tried so far absolutely hate memory speeds above ddr4 3733 they might boot and load windows a ddr4 3800 but many are experiencing silent windows hardware errors since the infinity fabric is just unstable amd says that a future igisa update will improve infinity fabric overclocking and as a result one-to-one memory overclocking as well but at this point who knows if it'll help across the board now that you all hopefully have a little better understanding of the various memory related frequencies on ryzen processors let's find out the performance difference between them and to do that we ran our benchmarking suite at four different memory speeds from ddr4 3200 all the way up to ddr4 4000 and kept identical 18 18 18 timings to isolate the gains to nothing more than faster memory and infinity fabric there's also a little wild card here too with the same asynchronous ddr4 4000 numbers so let's just dive right in as you can see there's definitely a small but steady increase in performance in a number of workloads when you boost the memory speed once again though 4 000 megahertz is a level that is outside the reach of most consumers at the moment and we did have to manually synchronize the ratios as we mentioned earlier even in games if we zero in on ddr4 3600 results those do tend to be a sweet middle spot when it comes to performance and in some cases 3800 megahertz and 4 000 megahertz do give a bit high performance but they smash into the law of diminishing returns meanwhile asynchronous four thousand megahertz results really do show the benefits of running one to one and that's good news since there are a ton of pretty affordable 16 gigabyte and 32 gigabyte ddr4 3600 memory kits around all you need to do to take advantage of the performance of these memory kits is to pop them onto your system and then go into the bios to enable xmp or axmp or docp depending on the brand motherboard you have now the only downside is those affordable kits tend to have really loose timings and as we showed earlier timings still do matter a bit and there's always a way to overcome that even for novices the first step is to download a simple program called typhoon burner that will let you know exactly what chips your memory kits is made with just press read and a bunch of information is going to pop up you need to know the number of ranks the revision and the memory type then when you know the memory type you can enter that information into the dram calculator for ryzen and that will give you a precise timings and you can enter into the bios and achieve lower latencies and better performance there are safe and fast options so check which ones work best for you the dram calculator is not really optimized for zen 3 yet but since very little has changed and the whole memory side of the platform is basically the same it still seems to work quite well as long as you stick to the timings suggestions and ignore the voltage recommendations then take a picture of this and apply the numbers in your bios if and when your system boots up with the new tighter timings you can test for stability in dram calculator by using its built-in memory stress test called membench last but not least you should fire up the zen timings tool we showed you earlier to verify that all your frequencies are running in that golden one to one to one ratio if they are then success now obviously this was just a speedy overview of what you need to do if you want us to go into even more detail just you know let us know in the comments down below but there is one last thing that i promised to you and that's to push this platform to the absolute max with the crucial 5100 megahertz kit now can you believe that it's so fast that we actually hit the wall on the new rog crosshair a dark hero at ddr4 4866 now switching to the aorus b550 master allowed us to hit it at full speed since the kit and the board are validated to run together and no this isn't at a one-to-one ratio since right now that just would be impossible we could never have imagined achieving these memory speeds when we were testing the first and second generation ryzen processors the results really are impressive but they also show how not being able to run at the magical one-to-one ratio can limit performance now sure there are huge speed ups in the right applications but ultimately this kind of kit is going to be used by overclockers who want to set world records and synthetic bandwidth benchmarks rather than just normal users it is really cool to see that these modules can do this so yeah it is fascinating so that pretty much concludes this video hopefully it comes in handy if and when you manage to get a hold of a ryzen 5000 series cpu we tried to share with you every bit of knowledge that we had after hours actually hundreds and hundreds of hours of testing without making it all sound too complicated and i hope it worked out and i also have to thank crucial once again since without them this video with apples to apples comparisons just wouldn't have been possible this has all shown us that every little bit of extra performance matters and when you combine all the elements of dual rank frequencies and latency together many small increases can lead to a pretty significant change ultimately if you can afford it our recommendation is to just buy the cheapest dual rank 32 gigabyte ddr4 3600 megahertz kit that you can find now how we know if that is dual rank before buying well what we would do is advise you to check out user reviews or just do a quick google search of the product name with dual rank added to your search keyword chances are someone on reddit or a pc tech forum has probably mentioned it before so on that note thank you so much for watching guys i hope you guys enjoyed this one and i'll talk to you guys in the next one

Channel: Hardware Canucks

Views: 294,438

Rating: 4.9349895 out of 5

Keywords: ryzen 5000 memory, ryzen 5000 memory scaling, zen 3 memory, ryzen 5000 memory overclocking, ryzen 5000, zen 3, zen 3 benchmarks, amd ryzen 5000, ryzen 5000 series, amd zen 3, ryzen 5000 benchmark, zen 3 performance, zen 3 benchmark, amd ryzen 5000 series, hardware canucks, hardwarecanucks, best ram

Id: kEP8iVVQR-g

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EyeZer0]

I want to note that unlike what’s commented on in the video Crucial has switched to Single Rank 16GB sticks according to my experience of two sets of White RGB 3600CL16 32GB(16x2) I received today from Amazon and from other anecdotal evidence if you search recent posts about Crucial ram on the Build A PC Sales subreddit.

[u/halcyon]

This is actually very good, esp. for a so called beginner's guide. Tested:

- single rank vs dual rank

- different memory speeds (e,g, 3500 vs 4000 vs 5100 Mhz)

- different latencies (e.g. cl14 vs cl18)

- FCLK speed async max vs highest 1:1

- a mixture of above

- with some considerations about price of different modules

- and which tools to use to identify, test and manually input your modules optimal/hopefully fastest latencies into the UEFI/BIOS

[u/lordlors]

I have a 5900X. The problem is though, if I set FCLK beyond 1600MHz like say 1800MHz, bus interconnect errors (WHEA) pile up as I play games or run benchmarks. A lot of people are experiencing it. So I'm currently stuck at 1600MHz FCLK which means 3200MHz speed for the RAM when previously with my 3600, I ran 1800MHz FCLK 3600MHz CL16 4 sticks of 8 GB no problems.

[u/Executor_115]

For anyone looking to buy two 16GB dual-rank sticks but worried they might end up with single-rank, there is a way of guaranteeing dual-rank: buy only DDR4-3200+ at CL14. The only memory capable of such high clocks with such low timings is Samsung B-die. Samsung B-die only comes in the 8Gb (1GB) variety, therefore either an 8GB single-rank DIMM or a 16GB dual-rank DIMM. The downside is you'll end up paying a 20-30% premium over DDR4-3200 CL16. Since about 2Q 2020, more and more RAM manufacturers have been transitioning to single-rank 16GB sticks as it's cheaper, so it's risky to buy 16GB DIMMs and expect dual-rank.

[u/m1llie]

I got 2x32GB 3600 C18 for my ITX system (2 DIMM slots) because it was stupid cheap and guaranteed to be dual rank (vs a roll of the dice for 16GB DIMMs). This video makes me happier about my choice.

[u/halotechnology]

Glad I got the old crucial ballsitix 16Gbx2 dual rank running at 3800Mhz with Cas16

On 3700x

Did anyone ever was about to run fclock of 2000mhz on Zen 3000s ?

[u/ibhoot]

Reinforced my initial thoughts when I went for well binned 3600 CL16 2x 16GB sticks. Solid guide.