For AMD Cpus is it better to pair qith 2 or 4 sticks of ram?

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Ladic

[H]ard|Gawd
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So say you want 32gb of ram, is better to do 2x16gb or 4x8gb?
 
tbh it doesn't really matter if you're using zen 2 (zen 1/1+ might be a little more picky), the IMC on those chips has been tuned specifically for daisy chain which most of the boards have except for some of the 300 series boards and maybe the asus CH7 if i remember correctly so you shouldn't have issues running 4x8 up to at least 3600, possibly higher. 4x16 might require a slightly higher SOC voltage to go up to 3600 but should work on any mid range/high end board. the easy way to check with your board is look on the QVL list and see what clock speeds they're showing for 4x8 configurations, then that should give you an idea if you'll be able to run 4x8 above 2933(doesn't mean you need to grab specific memory that's on the QVL though since they rarely ever get updated after launch). so if that looks good go with what ever option is available to you that has the better clock speeds/timing for the price.
 
I think buildzoid did a video on this. If I remember correctly, dual channel and dual rank was the best. Most, if not all 8gb sticks are single rank. Look up the video.
 
trick0502 said:
I think buildzoid did a video on this. If I remember correctly, dual channel and dual rank was the best. Most, if not all 8gb sticks are single rank. Look up the video.
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yeah i've seen the video and sure if you're doing it purely for benchmarking which is all buildzoid cares about then yeah those are the best options, but all you lose is a few ns of latency which you'll honestly never notice outside of benchmarks. but he also did a video before that showing 4x16GB at 4800mhz which i always find funny so why do it and then tell people not to do it... either way it's been brought up many times on his streams and his only argument for it is that latency is slightly worse even though he'll overexaggurate it as it being terrible but i think it's something like 67ns vs 72ns if you run 4x16GB vs 2x16.
 
kirbyrj said:
2x16 with AM4
4x8 with Threadripper
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I would not be buying 8gb dimms for Threadripper. In fact, I would not be looking at any dimms unless they were 16gb to start. You lose out bad with 8gb dimms on TR!!!!
 
For AMD platforms, the rank configuration doesn't matter much. Intel platforms, on the other hand, strongly favor a configuration that has exactly two ranks of memory per channel over a configuration that has only one rank per channel. Two ranks per channel may consist of either one double-rank stick or two single-rank sticks.

With that said, I would not buy a Threadripper platform that has less than 64 GB of RAM. Likewise, I would go for a minimum of 32 GB of RAM for a 3700X upwards, and 16 GB minimum for up to a 3600X.
 
thesmokingman said:
I would not be buying 8gb dimms for Threadripper. In fact, I would not be looking at any dimms unless they were 16gb to start. You lose out bad with 8gb dimms on TR!!!!
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I wouldn't either, but I just answered the OP's question as stated :p.
 
isn't this entirely dependent on the work load? rendering vs gaming had improvements with single rank vs dual rank but i do not remember which one was preferred for what task. also when the TR platform was new the 4x8 dual rank ram (32 gb total) was more common and a lot cheaper so there are a lot of builds floating around with that set up and it is not a 'performance hindrance' unless you are running 100% utilization continuously.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the IMC on those chips has been tuned specifically for daisy chain which most of the boards have except for some of the 300 series boards and maybe the asus CH7 if i remember correctly
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It's the C6H that's T-topology. C7H is daisy chain as per AMD recommendations. Reference
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
yeah i've seen the video and sure if you're doing it purely for benchmarking which is all buildzoid cares about then yeah those are the best options, but all you lose is a few ns of latency which you'll honestly never notice outside of benchmarks. but he also did a video before that showing 4x16GB at 4800mhz which i always find funny so why do it and then tell people not to do it... either way it's been brought up many times on his streams and his only argument for it is that latency is slightly worse even though he'll overexaggurate it as it being terrible but i think it's something like 67ns vs 72ns if you run 4x16GB vs 2x16.
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Those few ns make a big difference in 1% lows in games. What do you think tightening up the timings does?
 
Generally speaking, you cannot reach the same clock speeds with four DIMMs that you can with only two on AM4 or Intel systems. That said, Intel systems are more forgiving about memory configuration and clock speeds. AMD officially doesn't support anything beyond DDR4 2933MHz using four DIMMs. Obviously, many people including myself are using a 4x8GB or 4x16GB configuration at speeds far in excess of that. I'm at DDR4 3600MHz using four 16GB DIMMs in my personal machine.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
tbh it doesn't really matter if you're using zen 2 (zen 1/1+ might be a little more picky), the IMC on those chips has been tuned specifically for daisy chain which most of the boards have except for some of the 300 series boards and maybe the asus CH7 if i remember correctly so you shouldn't have issues running 4x8 up to at least 3600, possibly higher. 4x16 might require a slightly higher SOC voltage to go up to 3600 but should work on any mid range/high end board. the easy way to check with your board is look on the QVL list and see what clock speeds they're showing for 4x8 configurations, then that should give you an idea if you'll be able to run 4x8 above 2933(doesn't mean you need to grab specific memory that's on the QVL though since they rarely ever get updated after launch). so if that looks good go with what ever option is available to you that has the better clock speeds/timing for the price.
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Daisy chain actually favors 2 sticks. If you want the highest memory clocks, you'll want to stick with 2
 
A year or two from now when you want to upgrade your ram, it will be nice to have 2 free slots available...
 
If You need capacity max out the slots. They built the thing to handle 4 or 8 sticks.

But you might not be able to run as high of a frequency on ram which is ok. High capacity fast speed vs low capacity very fast speed.

You wont tell the difference to be honest unless your benchmarking.
 
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