ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac Memory advice please

[honkuimushi]

I plan to buy the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard and an i7 6700(non-K) CPU this weekend, but I'm having trouble deciding on the memory. I've seen testing that shows some nice gains for Skylake with memory in the 2666 -2800MHz range, but faster memory is a bit hard to find here in Japan and most of the memory listed on ASRock's approved memory list is not available here in 2x8 GB kits. I plan to build the computer December 7th,(Japan time) so I have about a week before I have to buy the RAM. Advice would be very much appreciated.

Here is what I'm thinking about:
For 2800
Kingston Hyper X Savage DDR4 2800 CL 14 HX428C14SBK2/16 20,980 yen
On the list, but kind of expensive.

Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2800 CL 14 CMK16GX4M2B2800C14 15.790 yen
Not on the list, but significantly cheaper.

G. Skill Ripjaws V DDR4 2800 CL15 F4-2800C15D-16GVRB 16,970 yen
This was my first choice in until the others arrived. Not on the list, but it was listed as used in a PC partpicker build.

For 2666

Kingston Hyper X Fury DDR4 CL15 HX426C15FBK2/16 15,480 yen
On the list

Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 CL16 CMK16GX4M2A2666C16 14,460 yen
Not on the list, but listed as compatible on Corsair's website.

Nothing else is on the list and the Crucial, Corsair and G.Skill prices are similar to DDR4 2800.

For 2400
There are several choices from the list,including Crucial, Corsair, Kingston and G. Skill. Prices range from about 13,000 - 14,000 yen. (Note: $1is about 123 yen.)

Because of the paucity of choices, I also looked at the DDR4 3000

Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000 CL 15 CMK16GX4M2B3000C15 16,760 yen
Not on list, but listed as compatible on Corsair's website

G. Skill Trident Z DDR4 3000 CL 15 F4-3000C15D-16GTZ 20,170yen
On the list, but expensive

Unfortunately, G. Skill's website does not list the motherboard on it's configurator and I didn't see and ASRock boards on the QVL lists for Ripjaws V over 2666 MHz. I'd like fast RAM, but the priority has to be working RAM. Given these conditions and prices, what's the best choice? Of course, if anyone has experience the the Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming-ITX/a, I would love to hear what RAM you used.

 

[koffeeshop77]

gskills are a very safe bet even if not listed it is highly likely they will work. i like tridents they have never failed me.

 

[rolli59]

The QVL list is just a snapshot of the market, if the modules adhere to specs they are compatible. Nobody has the time or the resources to test every modul type on the market

 

[Darkbreeze]

Is there a reason why you're intending to run a locked chip on an unlocked board? Are you needing crossfire/SLI capability or is it simply due to the support for higher speed memory? The reality is, any gains to be had from the use of memory that's faster on Skylake will be undetectable except by way of benchmarks. You'll never notice it in normal use. Differences in performance between 2133 and 3000 are on order of milliseconds, no more, except possibly in VERY large encoding or compression processes. If gaming or consumer applications are your main priority, you'll never see the difference at all.

You may already be aware of that but it doesn't hurt to mention it.

Personally I'd avoid the Kingston modules as they use PnP rather than XMP profiles, and aren't always as easily configured nor as high of quality as the more mature G.Skill units. G.Skill has been working with the platform longer, having released DDR4 earlier than pretty much everybody else, and has both refined their process a little better from what I'm told and also with their RipJaws and especially TriZ modules, the chip selection is likely to be better quality.

More expensive too, but not by that much. At least stateside, I don't know about the price relationship in Japan. As far as what's listed on the QVL lists, I don't ever even pay any attention to those anymore as pretty much no vendors make much effort at testing module compatibility beyond the first ten or twenty selections and most modern memory from the major players is already tested by THEM to be compatible on all the current chipsets.

For the price, I like the TriZ modules the best, and am currently awaiting mine to arrive on Monday for my 6700k build.

 

[honkuimushi]

Thanks for the responses so far. The main reason I'm not overclocking is that it's a bit much for the cooling in the Mini-ITX case I have and the locked processor is about $50 cheaper. But increasing the speed of the RAM seems to have less impact on temperatures. The main reason I picked the Z170 is that the H170 mini-ITX boards didn't have an M.2 slot or USB 3.1 support. If I'm going to have to get a Z170, it opens up the possibility for higher clocked memory.

I've also seen some benchmarks where increasing the speeds from 2133 to 2666 or 2800 did show some improvements on both encoding and zipping and a few FPS in some games (though others were not really affected) There was also an article that showed up to about a 5 FPS difference with an i3 6100. When you add that the difference in price between the 2133 and 2800 is about $15 for the G. Skill Ripjaws, it seemed to be worth considering, if the modules would work.

Finally, it may be optimistic, but I hope that multiadapter will make my integrated graphics a bit less useless and I wanted to give it a bit more headroom.

So, if I can do it and it costs about $15, I'm willing to try to see if I can get a slight boost either through the CPU or the IGP. But it's not really worth it if I have to return the memory and get a new set(a little harder over here) or have trouble getting it working. So I wanted to hear what other people's experiences had been and how much the increase in speed was worth. The explanation about the Kingston has already been very helpful.

 

[Darkbreeze]

M.2 makes sense, so that justifies the Z series board. Difference in price of faster memory IS negligible, but is not supported on any except the Z series boards which is why I was asking. Since you'll have a Z series board, the faster memory should be ok but not all speeds may be supported without overclocking the CPU as well, which you can't do with a locked unit. I'd probably stick with the 2133mhz modules unless you think you may change things to an unlocked chip later.

You may still be able to run the faster memory even without an unlocked, overclocked CPU on these chipsets but I can't verify that as I haven't tried it yet and haven't read or heard any feedback on this feature yet either. You might look into that. I'll look into it too as well as shoot a question to our resident memory guru and see what he has to say on the subject.

I'm not sure what "multiadapter" you're refering to, as I'm unfamiliar with the nomenclature, so maybe you can expand on that a little bit?

 

[honkuimushi]

Thanks, that's really helpful. By multiadapter I'm referring the capability of DX12 to use all graphics resources available even if the GPUs are not identical. So you could combine two nVidia GPUs that are ineligible for SLI or two AMD GPUs that are ineligible for Crossfire. You can even combine an nVidia card with an AMD card, or more relevant to this situation, a dedicated video card with an IGP. It's still new, and who knows how common it will be, but it was used in the SquareEnix DX12 demo and they said that the IGP was adding about 4 FPS to the demo. Evidently, they're also working on it for Ashes of the Singularity. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9740/directx-12-geforce-plus-radeon-mgpu-preview
http://www.pcgamer.com/directx-12-will-be-able-to-use-your-integrated-gpu-to-improve-performance/

As for how fast you can go on a locked processor, yes that's a concern. This is from a Eurogamer review of the i3 6100, which is the only locked CPU I've seen paired with higher speed RAM. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-intel-core-i3-6100-review

"Additionally, we benched the i3 6100 twice, first of all using the full 2666MHz bandwidth of our Corsair Vengeance DDR4 modules, and then paring that back to 2133MHz in order to match the memory restrictions on the H170, B150 and H110 motherboards more likely to be utilised for budget builds. And as the benchmarks came in, the results were fascinating - in many CPU-bound scenarios, the i3 6100 is significantly faster with higher-speed RAM. We devised the gaming benchmark set-up to eliminate the GPU as the limiting factor in performance but what is clear is that not only is CPU pushed to the fore, memory bandwidth is too. "

This Techspot article paired the same CPU with DDR4-3000. http://www.techspot.com/review/1087-best-value-desktop-cpu/

Thanks for your help.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Sure, no problem. This chipset is still new to me and since I don't have one in my hands yet for testing/reviewing it's hard to offer definitive answers to a lot of questions, but like you much of the information I've found via reviews by other sources. I do however trust the word of Tradesman1 probably above any of those reviewers, including many of the staff members here at Tom's, so I'll hold off making any assumptions until I hear from him as I know he's been testing various Skylake configurations this past week and should have some clarifying answers to the questions I posed.

 

[Darkbreeze]

So, after speaking to Tradesman1

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ddr-dram-faq,4154.html



He has indicated that on the current i7-6700 that HE has, he's able to run 2800-3000 modules on a Z170 board with no problem but that no different than with other generations, much depends on the strength of the processor. Some processors are inherently stronger than others, hence some of them can achieve better overclocks on the same hardware than others can. Silicone lottery and all that. So it would seem you'll be fine in that regard. You may have a need to play around with tweaking your bios settings a bit if it doesn't want to run natively at whatever it's advertised speed its, maybe slightly bump the voltage or up the BLCK settings, which by the way will allow for some slight overclocking of the CPU even on locked chips.

Worst case scenario, if you buy DDR4 3000 modules you may find you need to run them at 2800mhz speeds, or something along those lines, the fine details of which will be up to you and fiddling to fine tune will probably be a foregone conclusion.

 

[honkuimushi]

Thank you very much. This has clarified things immensely. Right now, I'm planning to go with the G. Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-2800. That shouldn't be pushing things too much, though as you said, I might have to tweak things manually, and, at worst, drop it to 2666. I'll drop in and report on my experience next week. And, if I have any problems, I be sure to ask.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Sounds like a good plan. I'm sure it will work out fine. Let me know how it goes. Like they say, pics or it didn't happen.

 

[honkuimushi]

So, I started the build last Monday and finished it last Friday, mostly working on it during club times at school. Everything is working fine so far, though it wasn't all clear sailing.

First off, I decided to test things before installing the video card and PSU, and that was a very good idea. On my first attempt at booting the computer there was nothing, no fans, no boot, no LED from the PSU. So I tried the paper clip test. That worked, so I took out one stick of RAM. That allowed me to boot into the BIOS. The memory was set at 2133 @1.2V and the 2800 is set for 1.25V, so that was likely the biggest problem. I set it to the XMP profile that was automatically detected in the BIOS, installed Windows, put the other stick of RAM in and went home.

The next day I tried to boot it up again and found that it wouldn't turn on again. I took out one stick of RAM, but it still wouldn't boot. Then I tried switching slots and sticks. One stick would boot from either slot. The other would only boot from one slot. I'm not sure why that would be the case. But when I had that stick in its preferred slot and the other stick in the other slot, it booted with both sticks @2800. I still have the computer at school, so I haven't been able to do much testing, but everything looks good so far. I did run Firestrike and it was over 10400. I'm really glad I got a fully modular PSU. It made testing a lot easier. Hopefully, it should be solid from here on. Thanks for all the help.

As for pictures, I've never posted pictures here, so let's see if this works:

My parts

The BIOS screen after getting both sticks working

A top view

A side view with the mess of cables

The other side

The front, with a DVD for size comparison

 

[Darkbreeze]

Nice job my friend. Looks good. I'm sure you'll be very happy with it. That's a sweet rig. Seriously, nice job.

 

[honkuimushi]

Thanks for the kind words. I just got it home and I'm still installing games and getting everything set up. It's certainly a step up from the Core2Duo E6850 and Radeon HD 4830 I was using. I hope it will last me about 5 years with some minor upgrades.