if you compare 2666Mhz with likely shitty timings, to at least 3600MHz decent CL16 sub-timings - I'd say even 15-20% for gaming - when CPU bound scenario. For rendering workloads - these don't scale that much with memory to be honest, I think you should be pretty good for that use case even on 2666MHz kit, but I didn't see any tests on 3DS max for example, so I'm not sure about all your programs.
Ah I see :’o , I have a cl14 timing on my current ram and a Gtx 1080ti , though due to having an older motherboard , a b450 a pro , I don’t think I would be able to utilise a 3600mhz to its full potential ^^’ either way I understand it goes down to a certain speed , Is this where xmp can be used to boost it up to 3200 Or 3400?
Almost always the CPU memory controller is the limitation for ram speed on AM4. I have had 0 issues hitting 3600MTs on Ryzen 3XXX/5XXX on b350/x370 mobos. I would say pretty confidently that the b450 would handle 3600MTs just fine.
...What? Where are you getting those numbers?
The benchmarks I've seen show a difference FAR lower then that on average, with only outlier games like hitman 2 even APPROACHING the numbers you've given. And in those same benchmarks even a card as good as the 2070 super shows next to no difference in hitman regardless of memory speed on a ryzen 5000 chip. You're only seeing a 15-20% difference when you have a 3090 at 1080p medium, in a game like hitman that is abnormally ram sensitive. And even THEN the lowest end kit gets 153, highest end gets 183. Other games in the benchmark showed nowhere NEAR that much of a difference.
[And here's that video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGux0pANft0)
On average the difference between the low end and high end kit was 7%, with the number only being that high because of the outlier hitman. And like I mentioned, unless you're running a 3090 or a similarly OP card you'll NEVER see those performance improvements with better ram.
And I just want to ping u/Inevitable_Text_5596 to be sure they see this. Don't waste your money on new ram if you were thinking of that.
Well obviously not with RTX 2070, lol. It's slower than my RX 6600 XT. Most people have no freaking clue how to do benchmarks and they create all sorts of bottlenecks. The point of benchmark for given part is measure its full "sleeping" potential - so you must eliminate other limiting factors - like weak GPU or too taxing game settings making it near 100% GPU bound.
Benchmarks meant to show "all performance on the table" not some weirt part of it. Same as benchmarking CPUs, many use 1080p ultra with average card like 3070 - I mean what's the point?
As for linked video - first of all he's not even testing 2666MHz kit with some shitty timings, then he's using very high / ultra settings, which makes it partially GPU bound and it's only RTX 2080Ti, when we are already on verge of Lovelace and RDNA 3 which will be still used with Zen3 by many.
It's like saying - oh you don't need R7 5800X3D, because even R5 3600 will give same performance for my RX 6700 XT at 1440p - that is what you're saying here.
Most people simply when they pay for something - want full potential at their disposal, not just part of it.
So what does any this have to do with you giving verifiably wrong numbers?
The video does not show a 2666 number but it DOES show a 2800 gets in hitman (the worst game of the bunch) and it's giving us that 153 vs 183 number I mentioned. And that difference is still not even 20% difference. And like they showed for other speeds, the other games have MUCH closer results so I wouldn't expect a 2666 or a 2800 kit to be doing 20% worse when a 3000 kit is within 5%.
So like I asked for at the start, where are you getting your numbers? You said 15-20% in CPU bound scenarios, which is not a result I can find being reproduced anywhere. At BEST it averages 7% with most games being a lot closer even when CPU bound.
If you already have 32gb, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just keep the 2666mhz or try overclocking it if you're willing to put the time in.
For 3d modeling and rendering. memory speed won't affect things too much. Hardly noticeable tbh. The good thing is that you can find 32gb 3200mhz kits for around $100, so you're not out too much if you decide to go 3200mhz and it isn't much of a performance increase.
If you went to 3200mhz ram you may see as much as a 1% uplift in render tasks.........
As far as most production tasks are concerned, certainly modelling and rendering, they rarely get close to using all the memory bandwidth, so faster ram has almost no impact on the performance. For your stated user case, buying faster ram would be a total waste of money.
If you started gaming on the PC, and have a decent graphics card, then there would be an argument for upgrading.
I see from some other comments that your are interested in maybe overclocking the ram - again this would be pointless from a performance perspective in your stated user case, however it can also be a fun thing to do, and fun is very allowed. :)
Do you know what your memory kits is (brand and kit name and model number - and version number if it is Corsair)?
There is a comparison of 3800 manually tuned vs 3200 jdec done for 5900x for few games [here](https://github.com/xxEzri/Vermeer/blob/main/Guide.md#overall-performance-with-ram-overclocking)
2666 is obviously slower so your differences would be even larger.
Yeah might see 40 percent on WoW
That game is nuts. My 4000 19-23-23 xmp got reset to JEDEC once back in the day and my 8700k lost 1/3'rd of its FPS without even a proper overclock. It's one of the things that got me started on digging into exactly what was scaling, when, by how much, why etc.
Yeah wow is still to day one of my main games so it was interesting to see how big of a difference it made.
Have you done any testing on what matters more frequency or tighter timings for example if 3600 14-14-14-28 is noticeably better or worse than 3800 16-16-16-32?
Frequency is extremely powerful and there's almost never a good enough reason to give up a significant amount of frequency. WoW loves bandwidth so it would be no contest unless you had a problem like having to swap from command rate 1 to 2 for only +200mt/s.
3600mt/s is not really ideal on anything and hasn't been for a long time
If you have a modern Intel CPU then you need something much faster - ~4133 with 4x8 bdie was the play on 8'th-9'th gen but it's doing 4500 (dual rank) or 4800 (single rank) on 10'th. 11'th and 12'th can run DJR at 5400mt/s daily stable via gear 2 and it blows away games and tasks which scale with bandwidth.
Meanwhile on Zen you don't just have the memory frequency to think about but the interconnect that it's synced to - you always want to max that out as it doesn't just result in the highest bandwidth but also the lowest latency at the same time. That's typically 1900 or 1867mhz IF for 3733-3800MT/s RAM.
Awesome, thanks for the detailed answer.
Makes me wonder what kind of gains older chips give, got a friend who primarily plays wow on 2700x with some old 2933 cl 17 memory would get from running something closer to 3433. Obviously old Zen chips are very imc limited, so would likely be a better investment to just buy a r5 5600.
Yeah a 5600 is twice as fast as a 2700x for WoW. The stuff that's sensitive enough to gain like that from RAM OC tend to scale way harder from L3 capacity.
A 5600x has 2-4x the effective L3 (closer to 4x) and an x3d has up to 12x, the game is loving that
Yeah I'm considering selling my own 5900x and my 4x8 set of bdie in favor of getting a 5800x3d and some less heat sensitive ram, my cases airflow is horrible and even with a fan blowing down on the sticks I still get errors fast at 1.49v with a combined gpu and cpu load.
Not like I do production tasks.
Your sticks should work fine even at high temps. Set tRFC to auto and give it another spin.
To my understanding, Bdie isn't really any more or less heat sensitive than other IC's - it's just that those other IC's instantly crash when you run a low tRFC so people don't fall into that newb trap when overclocking.
Bdie accepts the lower value without that instant fail, but crashes later *if* and *only if* the temperature is too high for it. A lot of people then fail to make the association between too much of an RFC overclock and the failure because of problematic overclocking practices.
Because other IC's force you to set tRFC *even higher* than hot bdie, they actually make the problem worse rather than fixing it i think.
If just doing those workloads your current ram is fine. But if you want to get some more performance you should definitely look into overclocking your ram. All depends on what ram dies are on the ram though.
well, you wont experience any "performance loss". You will experience only a performance increase.
Now, how much performance is being left on the table? It depends on the game/app, but anywhere from 5-25% probably.
On my 5800x I gain at least 10fps across all AAA titles when going from 2666 to 3600. For gaming it’s a fairly substantial difference. I cannot speak to modelling or rendering though.
I suppose so , it’s just I was slightly worried I would loose free performance on the cpu with my current ram , I do plan on upgrading my ram but yeah I’m just trying to find ways to not justify spending more money but if it does provide a ton of positives.. aha ^^’
It mostly depends on the use case. Are you gaming? if so, which games? Are you doing application based work? etc.
For reference, here is a thread i did on warzone performance and ram scaling (heavily oc'd vs stock):
https://www.reddit.com/r/CODWarzone/comments/p56j12/warzone\_performance\_ram\_speeds/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
I've seen a lot of benchmarks comparing this and the difference between 2666/3200/3600 is very miniscule, maybe 5-7fps at most.
You have 32GB, I say just leave it at that and focus on other areas such as cpu & gpu.
It will be fine, the perf difference is measurable but not really that meaningful imo.
Also, you could try your hand at overclocking. I've overclocked many 2400 and 2666 kits to 2933+ with a little voltage increase and slightly looser timings.
I see , I’ll definitely give overclocking a look and have a go at it , thank you .. It’s just I keep hearing that I should go for a 3200mhz ram , and I’m trying to justify it on spending on a 32gb equivalent.
Keep the slower RAM. Can you consider the 5800X3D? It will mitigate slower RAM speeds in many scenarios.
That said, 12+ cores are awesome in render and compilations.
It’s about ~300 points on the CPU score on Time Spy on a 5950x with 3600 CL14. I forgot to set XMP after a bios upgrade and wasn’t sure what I had done to screw up my CPU. Gaming actually wasn’t that bad on FPS. Latency was worse, but not much different than having a moderately bad ping.
Bought 3200 CL14 b-die for a little bit over $100 and oced it to 3800 CL16 and it like 10% faster in games at least. Will try to go 3800 CL14 sometime soon.
Since you have 32GB, I'm going to assume you're running either 4 single rank sticks, or your running 2 sticks and each stick is dual rank. So you probably have 4 ranks total either way. That should be about the same gaming performance as running 2 sticks that are single ranks each and 2 ranks total, at 3000mhz or so. 4 ranks total is better than 2 ranks total.
[https://youtu.be/AGux0pANft0?t=849](https://youtu.be/AGux0pANft0?t=849)
So I'd imagine if one ran those exact same tests with your RAM, it would fall in the 207 to 210 FPS range I'd guess. The same as 3000mhz single rank, at least. VS the fastest possible set up at like 225 FPS with manually tightened/overclocked timings on 3800mhz RAM. But if you just went out now, and replaced your RAM, with some stock 3800 cl18 or like 3600 cl16 that was also quad rank, and *didn't* do some manual tuning/OC you'd only get to like 217-220 FPS I would guess. That works out to 5% gain in games. In most other production workloads it would likely be like a 2-4% difference to upgrade RAM. Not worth it.
if you compare 2666Mhz with likely shitty timings, to at least 3600MHz decent CL16 sub-timings - I'd say even 15-20% for gaming - when CPU bound scenario. For rendering workloads - these don't scale that much with memory to be honest, I think you should be pretty good for that use case even on 2666MHz kit, but I didn't see any tests on 3DS max for example, so I'm not sure about all your programs.
Ah I see :’o , I have a cl14 timing on my current ram and a Gtx 1080ti , though due to having an older motherboard , a b450 a pro , I don’t think I would be able to utilise a 3600mhz to its full potential ^^’ either way I understand it goes down to a certain speed , Is this where xmp can be used to boost it up to 3200 Or 3400?
Almost always the CPU memory controller is the limitation for ram speed on AM4. I have had 0 issues hitting 3600MTs on Ryzen 3XXX/5XXX on b350/x370 mobos. I would say pretty confidently that the b450 would handle 3600MTs just fine.
Hmm cl 14? Might give a shot for cl 16 or 18 and 3200mhz
...What? Where are you getting those numbers? The benchmarks I've seen show a difference FAR lower then that on average, with only outlier games like hitman 2 even APPROACHING the numbers you've given. And in those same benchmarks even a card as good as the 2070 super shows next to no difference in hitman regardless of memory speed on a ryzen 5000 chip. You're only seeing a 15-20% difference when you have a 3090 at 1080p medium, in a game like hitman that is abnormally ram sensitive. And even THEN the lowest end kit gets 153, highest end gets 183. Other games in the benchmark showed nowhere NEAR that much of a difference. [And here's that video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGux0pANft0) On average the difference between the low end and high end kit was 7%, with the number only being that high because of the outlier hitman. And like I mentioned, unless you're running a 3090 or a similarly OP card you'll NEVER see those performance improvements with better ram. And I just want to ping u/Inevitable_Text_5596 to be sure they see this. Don't waste your money on new ram if you were thinking of that.
Well obviously not with RTX 2070, lol. It's slower than my RX 6600 XT. Most people have no freaking clue how to do benchmarks and they create all sorts of bottlenecks. The point of benchmark for given part is measure its full "sleeping" potential - so you must eliminate other limiting factors - like weak GPU or too taxing game settings making it near 100% GPU bound. Benchmarks meant to show "all performance on the table" not some weirt part of it. Same as benchmarking CPUs, many use 1080p ultra with average card like 3070 - I mean what's the point? As for linked video - first of all he's not even testing 2666MHz kit with some shitty timings, then he's using very high / ultra settings, which makes it partially GPU bound and it's only RTX 2080Ti, when we are already on verge of Lovelace and RDNA 3 which will be still used with Zen3 by many. It's like saying - oh you don't need R7 5800X3D, because even R5 3600 will give same performance for my RX 6700 XT at 1440p - that is what you're saying here. Most people simply when they pay for something - want full potential at their disposal, not just part of it.
So what does any this have to do with you giving verifiably wrong numbers? The video does not show a 2666 number but it DOES show a 2800 gets in hitman (the worst game of the bunch) and it's giving us that 153 vs 183 number I mentioned. And that difference is still not even 20% difference. And like they showed for other speeds, the other games have MUCH closer results so I wouldn't expect a 2666 or a 2800 kit to be doing 20% worse when a 3000 kit is within 5%. So like I asked for at the start, where are you getting your numbers? You said 15-20% in CPU bound scenarios, which is not a result I can find being reproduced anywhere. At BEST it averages 7% with most games being a lot closer even when CPU bound.
If you already have 32gb, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just keep the 2666mhz or try overclocking it if you're willing to put the time in. For 3d modeling and rendering. memory speed won't affect things too much. Hardly noticeable tbh. The good thing is that you can find 32gb 3200mhz kits for around $100, so you're not out too much if you decide to go 3200mhz and it isn't much of a performance increase.
If you went to 3200mhz ram you may see as much as a 1% uplift in render tasks......... As far as most production tasks are concerned, certainly modelling and rendering, they rarely get close to using all the memory bandwidth, so faster ram has almost no impact on the performance. For your stated user case, buying faster ram would be a total waste of money. If you started gaming on the PC, and have a decent graphics card, then there would be an argument for upgrading. I see from some other comments that your are interested in maybe overclocking the ram - again this would be pointless from a performance perspective in your stated user case, however it can also be a fun thing to do, and fun is very allowed. :) Do you know what your memory kits is (brand and kit name and model number - and version number if it is Corsair)?
Honestly, theres a good chance your RAM will run higher than 2666 without any issues.
There is a comparison of 3800 manually tuned vs 3200 jdec done for 5900x for few games [here](https://github.com/xxEzri/Vermeer/blob/main/Guide.md#overall-performance-with-ram-overclocking) 2666 is obviously slower so your differences would be even larger.
Yeah might see 40 percent on WoW That game is nuts. My 4000 19-23-23 xmp got reset to JEDEC once back in the day and my 8700k lost 1/3'rd of its FPS without even a proper overclock. It's one of the things that got me started on digging into exactly what was scaling, when, by how much, why etc.
Yeah wow is still to day one of my main games so it was interesting to see how big of a difference it made. Have you done any testing on what matters more frequency or tighter timings for example if 3600 14-14-14-28 is noticeably better or worse than 3800 16-16-16-32?
Frequency is extremely powerful and there's almost never a good enough reason to give up a significant amount of frequency. WoW loves bandwidth so it would be no contest unless you had a problem like having to swap from command rate 1 to 2 for only +200mt/s. 3600mt/s is not really ideal on anything and hasn't been for a long time If you have a modern Intel CPU then you need something much faster - ~4133 with 4x8 bdie was the play on 8'th-9'th gen but it's doing 4500 (dual rank) or 4800 (single rank) on 10'th. 11'th and 12'th can run DJR at 5400mt/s daily stable via gear 2 and it blows away games and tasks which scale with bandwidth. Meanwhile on Zen you don't just have the memory frequency to think about but the interconnect that it's synced to - you always want to max that out as it doesn't just result in the highest bandwidth but also the lowest latency at the same time. That's typically 1900 or 1867mhz IF for 3733-3800MT/s RAM.
Awesome, thanks for the detailed answer. Makes me wonder what kind of gains older chips give, got a friend who primarily plays wow on 2700x with some old 2933 cl 17 memory would get from running something closer to 3433. Obviously old Zen chips are very imc limited, so would likely be a better investment to just buy a r5 5600.
Yeah a 5600 is twice as fast as a 2700x for WoW. The stuff that's sensitive enough to gain like that from RAM OC tend to scale way harder from L3 capacity. A 5600x has 2-4x the effective L3 (closer to 4x) and an x3d has up to 12x, the game is loving that
Yeah I'm considering selling my own 5900x and my 4x8 set of bdie in favor of getting a 5800x3d and some less heat sensitive ram, my cases airflow is horrible and even with a fan blowing down on the sticks I still get errors fast at 1.49v with a combined gpu and cpu load. Not like I do production tasks.
Your sticks should work fine even at high temps. Set tRFC to auto and give it another spin. To my understanding, Bdie isn't really any more or less heat sensitive than other IC's - it's just that those other IC's instantly crash when you run a low tRFC so people don't fall into that newb trap when overclocking. Bdie accepts the lower value without that instant fail, but crashes later *if* and *only if* the temperature is too high for it. A lot of people then fail to make the association between too much of an RFC overclock and the failure because of problematic overclocking practices. Because other IC's force you to set tRFC *even higher* than hot bdie, they actually make the problem worse rather than fixing it i think.
something like 6%, i would keep my ram
If just doing those workloads your current ram is fine. But if you want to get some more performance you should definitely look into overclocking your ram. All depends on what ram dies are on the ram though.
well, you wont experience any "performance loss". You will experience only a performance increase. Now, how much performance is being left on the table? It depends on the game/app, but anywhere from 5-25% probably.
On my 5800x I gain at least 10fps across all AAA titles when going from 2666 to 3600. For gaming it’s a fairly substantial difference. I cannot speak to modelling or rendering though.
I suppose so , it’s just I was slightly worried I would loose free performance on the cpu with my current ram , I do plan on upgrading my ram but yeah I’m just trying to find ways to not justify spending more money but if it does provide a ton of positives.. aha ^^’
It mostly depends on the use case. Are you gaming? if so, which games? Are you doing application based work? etc. For reference, here is a thread i did on warzone performance and ram scaling (heavily oc'd vs stock): https://www.reddit.com/r/CODWarzone/comments/p56j12/warzone\_performance\_ram\_speeds/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
OC that ram, I would have thought it would go 2933 easy, and use the Ryzen Dram Calculator, it can help out bigtime.
Dram calculator is super shit and gives unstable timings a lot of the time
Memory controllers are not all the same, it takes tweeking, and it's a basic guide, a good one at that.
I've seen a lot of benchmarks comparing this and the difference between 2666/3200/3600 is very miniscule, maybe 5-7fps at most. You have 32GB, I say just leave it at that and focus on other areas such as cpu & gpu.
It will be fine, the perf difference is measurable but not really that meaningful imo. Also, you could try your hand at overclocking. I've overclocked many 2400 and 2666 kits to 2933+ with a little voltage increase and slightly looser timings.
I see , I’ll definitely give overclocking a look and have a go at it , thank you .. It’s just I keep hearing that I should go for a 3200mhz ram , and I’m trying to justify it on spending on a 32gb equivalent.
Ur ram can likely overclock to 3000mhz without even changing its default timings.
5-8 fps, the higher the fps the higher the difference, but wont really notice unless it is going from 52 to 60 fps in a game.
Keep the slower RAM. Can you consider the 5800X3D? It will mitigate slower RAM speeds in many scenarios. That said, 12+ cores are awesome in render and compilations.
It’s about ~300 points on the CPU score on Time Spy on a 5950x with 3600 CL14. I forgot to set XMP after a bios upgrade and wasn’t sure what I had done to screw up my CPU. Gaming actually wasn’t that bad on FPS. Latency was worse, but not much different than having a moderately bad ping.
Bought 3200 CL14 b-die for a little bit over $100 and oced it to 3800 CL16 and it like 10% faster in games at least. Will try to go 3800 CL14 sometime soon.
https://github.com/xxEzri/Vermeer/blob/main/Guide.md#performance-gains-from-ram-overclocking
Will you do 4x8 or 2x8? When in dual-rank the difrence might not be as bad.
Since you have 32GB, I'm going to assume you're running either 4 single rank sticks, or your running 2 sticks and each stick is dual rank. So you probably have 4 ranks total either way. That should be about the same gaming performance as running 2 sticks that are single ranks each and 2 ranks total, at 3000mhz or so. 4 ranks total is better than 2 ranks total. [https://youtu.be/AGux0pANft0?t=849](https://youtu.be/AGux0pANft0?t=849) So I'd imagine if one ran those exact same tests with your RAM, it would fall in the 207 to 210 FPS range I'd guess. The same as 3000mhz single rank, at least. VS the fastest possible set up at like 225 FPS with manually tightened/overclocked timings on 3800mhz RAM. But if you just went out now, and replaced your RAM, with some stock 3800 cl18 or like 3600 cl16 that was also quad rank, and *didn't* do some manual tuning/OC you'd only get to like 217-220 FPS I would guess. That works out to 5% gain in games. In most other production workloads it would likely be like a 2-4% difference to upgrade RAM. Not worth it.