Hi Sorry im sure this has been asked alot and i did serach but still bit confused. I was looking to go for 16gb but seem to be many different choices.
Ryzen 2 (3rd generation...) is a lot more tolerant than the older Ryzen setups. Current wisdom seems to say that the best price / performance is at 3200 or 3600 if you have more to spend. I'm sure someone more attuned will add to it, IIRC it's 3200 CL16 RAM that works well on price.
Probably best to see what's on the motherboards QVL list, but I've had no problems with a B450 Tomahawk MAX and a 3600 with either my expensive 8-pack 3200 CL14 kit, and my much cheaper 3600 CL18 kit of Corsair LPX Vengeance. The 3200 kit gives slightly better performance than the 3600 kit, but nothing that makes it a "value" proposition over the cheaper LPX kit. If you take the time to tune the RAM timings, the 8-pack RAM could probably be even better, but still, not worth much extra money unless you want everything clocked to the limit. Most people seem to be able to get away with running the XMP profiles from what I've heard, whereas with earlier Ryzen chips, getting RAM to work at rated speed was always a struggle. *Note : Neither kit was shown on the motherboards QVL list, so I ignored my own advice ! ** Note 2 : Watch it with the LPX specs, looking now I even see 3600 Mhz kits CL19 and 20 ... I suspect at this sort of latency performance may be noticeably impacted.
Happy with my Crucial 3200Mhz. By all accounts it'll do 3600Mhz but i've not bothered trying yet. But yeah, worth checking your mobo's QVL
Does anyone know if the next gen B550 boards will take 3600 DDR4? I'm planning an upgrade from my Z270 setup and I was going to buy the memory first.
It's not really about the boards it's about the CPUs. Right now? the 3000 series are good to 3600 (though you may need to loosen timings a tad from your RAM's spec to make it fully stable) and is limited by the IFCLK. Ryzen 2000 series seem to like 3200 RAM, and god knows what Ryzen 3 (4000) will be able to do. Did some benching lately and a buddy jumped in also and we concluded that 3200 DDR4 @ 14 timings was just as quick as 3600 with CL16. Mine does CL15 (not tried 14 yet but will) and that did give it a slight edge but we are talking fractions. But yeah, as it sits the FCLK is half of the overall DDR4 clock, so anything over 3600 is a crap shoot because you are overclocking IF and even my 3950x doesn't like that one bit lol.
Nah. Corsair do not make memory modules, so they get everything the other OEMs get. It's made by SKHynix, Samsung etc. Any 3600 RAM with the same timings will be identical.
