Cheapest decent DDR4-2933 / 3000 / 3200 kit, 2x16GB? GSkill preferred.

[VirtualLarry]

Can you just use any of the 3200-rated GSKill TridentZ or RGB with AM4 / Ryzen 5 1600? Are most of them in mobo BIOS DRAM timing tables by now?

 

[Hans Gruber]

Larry, thanks for asking. I have Team Dark Pro DDR4 3200mhz 16-16-16-36 sticks. It's a 8GB kit on my Ryzen R3 1200 box. I have the MSI B350 gaming pro Carbon. It runs XMP settings above stock with zero problems. When I first got it last year I could only get 2900mhz. The bios issues have been fixed to where there is no ram speed or timing issues.

I have Gskill sticks, Team and Crucial Ballistik. Ram is ram in my book as long as it has a heat spreader.

I think I saw 16gb kit for $120 for 3000mhz. Prices keep falling, I would wait a bit longer for ram.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Interestingly enough, I just moved my 2x8GB Team Dark DDR4-2400 sticks, that wouldn't even run at 2400 in my Ryzen 5 1600 rig, split up into my two G4560 mining rigs (mining doesn't take a huge amount of RAM), and then pulled both Team Vulcan DDR4-2400 2x8GB kits and put all four 2400 sticks into my Ryzen 5 1600 rig, and they're running at 2400 right now.

I then took my spare set of Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 2x8GB from my 2400G box, and put them into another Ryzen 5 1600 rig, that already had a set, running at 2933.

Well, with all four sticks, the board won't even POST at anything higher than 2400, even though the RAM is rated at 3000, and it will run a single kit at that. I could *sometimes* boot at 2667.

Ah well, better to have 32GB of DDR4-2400, than 16GB of DDR4-2933, I guess.

But I'm wondering, 2x8GB kits are fairly inexpensive compared to faster 2x16GB kits, but my guess and feeling is, filling all four RAM slots on a Ryzen rig is going to REALLY limit your max mem clock. Or maybe I just need to bump my SoC voltage.

Edit: Bumping SoC voltage to 1.100V STILL didn't allow the four Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 sticks to boot at higher than 2400.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Interestingly enough, I just moved my 2x8GB Team Dark DDR4-2400 sticks, that wouldn't even run at 2400 in my Ryzen 5 1600 rig, split up into my two G4560 mining rigs (mining doesn't take a huge amount of RAM), and then pulled both Team Vulcan DDR4-2400 2x8GB kits and put all four 2400 sticks into my Ryzen 5 1600 rig, and they're running at 2400 right now.

I then took my spare set of Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 2x8GB from my 2400G box, and put them into another Ryzen 5 1600 rig, that already had a set, running at 2933.

Well, with all four sticks, the board won't even POST at anything higher than 2400, even though the RAM is rated at 3000, and it will run a single kit at that. I could *sometimes* boot at 2667.

Ah well, better to have 32GB of DDR4-2400, than 16GB of DDR4-2933, I guess.

But I'm wondering, 2x8GB kits are fairly inexpensive compared to faster 2x16GB kits, but my guess and feeling is, filling all four RAM slots on a Ryzen rig is going to REALLY limit your max mem clock. Or maybe I just need to bump my SoC voltage.

Edit: Bumping SoC voltage to 1.100V STILL didn't allow the four Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 sticks to boot at higher than 2400.

Two things. You can loosen the timings on the ram a bit. Have you updated your bios to the latest version? Bios updates usually alleviate the Ryzen ram issues on their own. On my Ryzen rig the bios updates in Sept 2017 fixed my ram issues entirely.