That is why you should try to overclock RAM on the Ryzen machine
As an above-average PC user, I checked many tech sources and found that Ryzen builds advantages from the high RAM frequency. For me, the best price for the frequency RAM was 3200MHz Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8 GB kit.
The CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and the motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix B450-I Gaming.
By default, RAM worked at 2400 MHz frequency and in order to get the advertised speed, I had to enable the XMP profile. It worked well for me. I checked the specs in the CPU-Z and was happy with the result: 3200 MHz.
But if you look closely, Command Rate (CR) is 2T.
Command rate — is the delay (in clock cycles) between when chip select is asserted (i.e. the RAM is selected) and commands (i.e. Activate Row) can be issued to the RAM. Typical values are 1T (one clock cycle) and 2T (two clock cycles).
I checked this RAM on another MOBO and CR was equal to 1T. So I decided to perform some tests in order to verify whether this delay harms the system’s performance or not.
I was shocked that the default 2400 MHz frequency with CR 1T gives better results that 3200 MHz with CR 2T. It was time to manual RAM timings tuning and overclocking.
I used the Ryzen dram calculator to get appropriate timings for my RAM, CPU, and frequency.
Results got slightly better than the XMP profile in multicore and it was almost the same as for default memory speed. The next step was overclocking and new frequency — 3466 MHz.
Numbers got even better, so it was the time to hit even higher frequency — 3600 MHz.
The system started with a much higher memory frequency than the XMP profile but results got worse than for 3466 MHz, so I decided to stick this frequency.
Summary:
- Always double-check and test the system’s default settings, because they could not work properly and even harm its performance.
- Slight RAM overclocking could give a pretty good performance boost for the Ryzen builds.
