Question G.Skill Trident Z royal not even hitting 3400mhz

[brotherbart]

I recently bought a 2x8gb G.Skill Trident Z royal 3600mhz gold kit.
The kit is supposed to work with CL18-22-22-42 at 3600mhz with 1.35v.
I bought this kit because I thought it would have great overclocking potential because of the samsung chips (which it doesn't have because it has Hynix chips).
When i tried running the kit at 3600mhz it didn't work, so I tried running it at lower freqeuncies.
I got it working stable at 3333mhz with 14-17-17-30 timings at 1,34v.

Does anybody know if there a way to still get it to run at 3600mhz or should i get my money back and get a better kit?

my specs:
ryzen 5 2600 (overclocked at 4,2ghz with 1,335v)
msi x370 gaming pro carbon
evga gtx 1070
650 corsair psu
and the ram kit

 

[Darkbreeze]

If you want better than you've managed to get so far, which is pretty damn good considering you're running a Ryzen platform that has trouble with anything beyond 3200mhz AND are not running B-die sticks (Having Samsung chips means very little, having Samsung B-die ICs means everything. There are a variety of different flavors of IC offered by Samsung and many of them are no better or worse than what's offered by Micron, or SK Hynix. Only the B-die memory chips are exemplary and a cut above.), then I'd recommend returning them and seeking a kit that does use B-die sticks.

Considering you're on an older chipset, especially if you don't have the latest BIOS version installed for your motherboard, you'll be lucky to do much better than you've done even with the higher end modules.

B350 and X370, even with up to date BIOS, are not going to offer the same high speed kit compatibility as the newer B450 and X470 chipset boards. The (expected to be) expensive X570 boards are supposedly going to natively do 3200mhz by default out of the box, with no OC, so that might be worth looking at as well especially with the other features it offers like PCIe 4.0.

These are B-die sticks, pretty much the least expensive ones you'll find for that speed and they have the added benefit of a very low latency, but you may find that you have trouble running CAS 15 latency on Ryzen and have to manually adjust to CAS 16 timings.

PCPartPicker Part List

Memory: G.Skill - Trident Z 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory ($164.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $164.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-06-29 01:36 EDT-0400

 

[DMAN999]

Darkbreeze nailed it.
You can't expect RAM to run above 3200 MHz on X370 or B350 boards.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Yeah as already said, 3600MHz on Ryzen is very very hard to do. And only golden chips can do it with ease.

3200mhz/3466mz are the max for Ryzen in general.

You did good though. Also, if you want higher memory frequencies, I'd recommend backing off your CPU overclock by a 100mhz. It'll help a little bit.

And make sure you overvolt the SOC, if you have not, that is your major issue.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I've never heard of backing off a CPU overclock to gain a higher memory overclock, UNLESS the problem is thermal compliance, rather than stability. Would you care to explain Techy because if this is an actual "thing" with Ryzen that you've come across I'd like to know about it.

Usually, so long as you can maintain thermal compliance, a HIGHER overclock on the CPU is beneficial to trying to get memory to run at faster clocks because it aids the internal memory controller to not be lazy.

 

[TechyInAZ]

I've never heard of backing off a CPU overclock to gain a higher memory overclock, UNLESS the problem is thermal compliance, rather than stability. Would you care to explain Techy because if this is an actual "thing" with Ryzen that you've come across I'd like to know about it.

Usually, so long as you can maintain thermal compliance, a HIGHER overclock on the CPU is beneficial to trying to get memory to run at faster clocks because it aids the internal memory controller to not be lazy.

For me personally, I had to due to thermals. I've found for Ryzen, if you tighten timings a lot, you can significantly increase CPU temperature doing so.

But, I've heard several other overclocks on forums, videos etc. say that backing off your CPU overclock a hair can give you extra memory headroom. Not sure why, I'm thinking due to the CPU running slower, that the memory controller has to work less. But then you should just increase IMC voltage if you have the available thermal headroom. But that's just my theory.

 

[Karadjgne]

Common theory, especially in gpus. First you OC boost clocks to see what you can get. After reset, bump memory clocks to maximum stable. You'll almost always find that the combination doest match up to the seperates. I can't see a cpu being any different, maximum OC is always the least possible stability wise, there's not much room for error. Bumping OC on ram speeds just adds to thermal loads and increases chances of instability, so relaxing the OC, but maintaining the voltages as is would be a bonus to stability, thermal loads would remain roughly the same.

Just a difference in perspective, doesn't apply to many, since they aren't pushing OC limits and have plenty of leeway in voltages and thermals.

 

[delaro]

Yeah as already said, 3600MHz on Ryzen is very very hard to do. And only golden chips can do it with ease.

3200mhz/3466mz are the max for Ryzen in general.

You did good though. Also, if you want higher memory frequencies, I'd recommend backing off your CPU overclock by a 100mhz. It'll help a little bit.

And make sure you overvolt the SOC, if you have not, that is your major issue.

It has to do with the BIOS revision levels when the 2nd gen support came out 1st gen boards took a hit on RAM overclocking. You see this complaint come up often and the results were exactly the same as mine. I have an X370 Tachi and 3200mhz G Skill Flare before those BIOS updates took place I could run 3600mhz with no problem but now 3400 is problematic and 3333mhz is stable.

 

[Darkbreeze]

For me personally, I had to due to thermals. I've found for Ryzen, if you tighten timings a lot, you can significantly increase CPU temperature doing so.

But, I've heard several other overclocks on forums, videos etc. say that backing off your CPU overclock a hair can give you extra memory headroom. Not sure why,

That would be due to thermal headroom. No other reason I can think of why you'd want, or need, to do that. The most common problem with running high speed memory on a number of platforms has been a lack of the ability to OVERCLOCK the CPU, in order to get the memory controller going at a fequency that would allow it to work with that speed of RAM. Usually a mild to moderate overclock of the CPU would cure that, IF the platform allowed overclocking of the CPU.

@delaro, that's weird, because I've only seen the ability to clock memory higher go UP as newer BIOS revisions were released.

 

[brotherbart]

Yeah as already said, 3600MHz on Ryzen is very very hard to do. And only golden chips can do it with ease.

3200mhz/3466mz are the max for Ryzen in general.

You did good though. Also, if you want higher memory frequencies, I'd recommend backing off your CPU overclock by a 100mhz. It'll help a little bit.

And make sure you overvolt the SOC, if you have not, that is your major issue.

I am running my CPU on water and have no problems with temps.

Yeah as already said, 3600MHz on Ryzen is very very hard to do. And only golden chips can do it with ease.

3200mhz/3466mz are the max for Ryzen in general.

You did good though. Also, if you want higher memory frequencies, I'd recommend backing off your CPU overclock by a 100mhz. It'll help a little bit.

And make sure you overvolt the SOC, if you have not, that is your major issue.

I was looking in to that and the other weird voltage options I saw in my BIOS after installing the latest BIOS version.
SOC auto's at about 1,15v how high can i push it safely?

 

[TechyInAZ]

I think you mean 1.15v. Because 1.5v is way over the max of 1.2v recommended by AMD.

As said, 1.2v is the absolute max you wanna be at.