Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words

What are our observations? We'll try to make it short and simple. You can see that the performance has increased in all of the tested games, sometimes very significantly once frequency goes up and latency goes down, but you need to keep in mind at all times that we tested it at 1080p with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, any other graphics card is far more GPU limited. Also, at higher resolutions, like 1440p/4K, the GPU will again become the limiting factor in most games, obliterating that memory performance differential. Regardless, Ryzen 3000 is very susceptible to DDR4 frequency, latency, and even ranks.

OC capabilities of RAM on Ryzen 3000 systems are very nice, so feel free to experiment a little. It’s possible to achieve more than 3600 MHz thanks to the various dividers that allow setting the different Infinity Fabric frequencies that can be synchronized with the memory clock or unlinked from it. The performance gain that’s possible to reach is even up to 10% seen from the lowest-performing kit, overclocking your RAM is clearly a cheaper solution than changing the GPU. We can sum it up by saying that most of the games in our test preferred frequency over latency.

   

If it's at 2T then set that Command Rate to 1T if it's possible because when you'll change this to 2T, you'll get about the same performance, as you'd lose the CAS by 2 (e.g. from CL16 to CL14).  It’s worth mentioning that a four DIMM configuration brings a nice benefit as well, so, if possible, we’d recommend going with say 4x 8 GB of RAM even if you wouldn’t use the full potential/capacity that this provides. The Double Rank memories bring a bit less than that, but still, it's another increase.

What about the 3733 MHz settings that are officially approved/recommended by AMD? Well, running that is not so simple, if stability is what you’re looking for. Judging by the tests, we can say that it’s usually not worth it to set your RAM to say 3800/4000 MHz (with Infinity Fabric set to 2:1). The best thing that you can do is get a kit that will run at DDR4-3600 with low latencies – this combination the best of two worlds and quite easily achievable. if you like to tweak a bit, we surely can advise using Ryzen DRAM Calculator, which is a good starting point, and the settings that you find there are going to bring an increased performance gain for most users.

Charts

Mathematically the below is not a rather precise one, but if we dump all average frames rendered per game you get a plot like this:

Conclusion

So in a very short summary. Set your Command Rate to 1T, because making 2T brings a similar result as lowering the CL by 2 (for example from CL18 to CL16). If possible (stability can be an issue) – set the frequency to 3733 MHz with that 1:1 Infinity divider, manually in the BIOS. Some people achieve even 3800 MHz frequency with that 1:1 setting, but that's a difficult task to make stability wise. If you can (i.e. have a kit of at say 32 GB) – use four DIMMs of memory as can bring a nice performance increase in some games. double rank memory brings some benefits as well, however, you will likely be bound to lower frequencies. The most optimal and easy way to get the best out of your gaming experience (and also from the stability point of view) setting is 3600 MHz and an as tight latency as possible (preferably CL14 with 1T, which is quite easily possible on Samsung B-die and Micron E-die chips. In short, we end with what we've been recommending for a long time now on the Ryzen platform in relation to gaming. 3200 MHz CL14, or 3600 MHz CL16. And if you can afford it or can run it with a tweak, CL14. Remember, the biggest bottleneck for gaming is your graphics card. The 5 to 10% performance differentials will vanish if you'd game at Ultra HD or a more mainstream graphics card for example. 

We hope you liked this little selection of results, perhaps it answers some questions for you and the choices you need to make in your purchasing decisions versus your budget available.

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