Question How do I speed up my ddr5 RAM

dverdier

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Dec 10, 2022
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Motherboard-6600
RAM-6400(3200)
Bios says-4400
DRAM Freq-1794.8 +-
Why are there so many conflicting numbers? Do I have to add voltage to the ram to get faster speeds? I tried overclocking. There is a "profile" for lack of a better term. XMP or something that says 6000 something but when I select that I can't post and have to reset the cmos. That hasn't worked on the first try once. It's like there's no science to that at all. Many restarts, resets and it just finally posts whenever it wants too. My bios look way dif now and has way less features after this last one so now I'm trying to get that back to normal. I bought some high end <Mod Edit> and I'd like to see it operate at it's potential. Maybe it's just not possible for what I'm doing. There's only one game on here at the moment and I have a fast cpu and overclocked to gpu and I still only get about 20fps on the highest settings. I kind of verged off there. My main question is about the ram here.
 
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dverdier

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Dec 10, 2022
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Ok, it's not top shelf across the board but I spent some money:

CPU-AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 4.5 GHz 16-Core
CPU Cooler-Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE CAPELLIX
Motherboard-Gigabyte B650 AORUS PRO AX ATX
Memory-G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 64 GB (2 x 32GB) X2
DDR5-6400 CL32 Memory 128GB Total
Storage-Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280
Storage-Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2 TB M.2-2280
PCle 3.0 X4 NVME SSD
Storage-PNY CS900 2 TB 2.5" SSD
Video Card-Gigabyte EAGLE Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB
Case-Fractal Design Pop XL Air ATX Full Tower
Power Supply-EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 P3 1000 W 80+
Optical Drive-Pioneer BDR-209DBK Blu-Ray/DVD/CDRW
OS-Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM-DVD 64-bit
There are some more fans and a few other accessories. Nothing else big.
 

DSzymborski

Titan
Moderator
First off, try it with only one of the RAM kits. Four sticks is kinda fiddly in DDR5 and you may simply not get the rated speeds, and this is complicated by having two different kits -- there's no such thing as identical RAM, just RAM that works together when tested at a spec.

Buildzoid talked about why using four sticks can be problematic.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8XLvZTqyX8
 
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dverdier

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Dec 10, 2022
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First off, try it with only one of the RAM kits. Four sticks is kinda fiddly in DDR5 and you may simply not get the rated speeds, and this is complicated by having two different kits -- there's no such thing as identical RAM, just RAM that works together when tested at a spec.

Buildzoid talked about why using four sticks can be problematic.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8XLvZTqyX8
So this is pretty far beyond me yet but basically what I got from it was, at this time and in his expirience these speeds are not yet capable of reaching with 4 sticks. 2 will but you need to overclock it. I'm only just now learning about overclocking. I thought the advertised speed is was it was and overclocking would take you further. I was wrong with that I guess. It also seems like by the time this is possible, it will only be with another motherboard. I think I need to drop to 2 dimms and overclock a bit. Is that what this guy is saying? If so, I'm almost afraid to overclock at all. The one time I tried was just with a preset like one step forward and it was incredibly hard to get cmos to reset. I don't know why but it wasn't as simple as unplug and short. It took many attemps and waiting bit upon restart before I could post again. I don't need 128gb at the moment. Do you think if I dropped to 64 it would go faster by itself or will I still need to overclock? Oh yeah, I didn't know until I did a little research buying them but I did keep the 2 and 2 together. One pack on one channel and the other pack on the other channel. I also marked them 1a and 1b...so I wouldn't get them mixed up in the future.
 

dverdier

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Dec 10, 2022
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Something else I don't understand is why when you overclock wrong your display is the first thing to go? That makes it incredibly hard to get things back in order.
 

DSzymborski

Titan
Moderator
So this is pretty far beyond me yet but basically what I got from it was, at this time and in his expirience these speeds are not yet capable of reaching with 4 sticks. 2 will but you need to overclock it. I'm only just now learning about overclocking. I thought the advertised speed is was it was and overclocking would take you further. I was wrong with that I guess. It also seems like by the time this is possible, it will only be with another motherboard. I think I need to drop to 2 dimms and overclock a bit. Is that what this guy is saying? If so, I'm almost afraid to overclock at all. The one time I tried was just with a preset like one step forward and it was incredibly hard to get cmos to reset. I don't know why but it wasn't as simple as unplug and short. It took many attemps and waiting bit upon restart before I could post again. I don't need 128gb at the moment. Do you think if I dropped to 64 it would go faster by itself or will I still need to overclock? Oh yeah, I didn't know until I did a little research buying them but I did keep the 2 and 2 together. One pack on one channel and the other pack on the other channel. I also marked them 1a and 1b...so I wouldn't get them mixed up in the future.

Test one of the sets and find out. You have a far better chance of XMP working with one matched kit of two sticks. I'm not even sure why you were trying to run 128 GB in the first place unless you have a very specific workstation use that you haven't mentioned yet. That's a lot of processor and a ludicrous amount of RAM to stuff into a midrange motherboard. There's a lot about this build that is wildly unbalanced.
 
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dverdier

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Sorry I left this open ended. I had a death in the family. I do appr. your expertise. I came into some money and before putting it all away I wanted to do something nice for myself. I wanted it to last me many years to come as well. so I went overboard in some areas, I guess. I've always been interested in computers starting with the old 3 and 486s. I def fell out of the loop around 02 or so. Recently I started upgrading cpu's and ram in some older systems and that's where I caught the bug again. I thought to myself, I can build one of these. I didn't realize I had a mid-range motherboard but for the price I should've guessed. It started out to be about 1,000-1,500-dollar build. Keep in mind this is my first build too. The more I kept looking into parts the more power and money I was spending. It ended up working its way towards 4 grand after some peripherals added after the first original compellation. I guess I left the motherboard behind after choosing other more powerful components. I used parts picker to make sure everything was compatible, and I guess while it can do that, it's not smart enough to look at the practicality of those choices. When I get back to that machine, I'll pull the second set of ram and try an overclocking preset one more time. I certainly don't understand this enough to enter my own parameters. One more question tho, why would a motherboard and ram advertise speeds they can't reach. I would think that's false advertisement. Or is it just I don't have the correct configuration to achieve such numbers. I can't even remember now what speed it's running at but I would think even tho I can't top out, I would be able to do a little better than where it was. Again, thank you for your insight.
 

DSzymborski

Titan
Moderator
Sorry I left this open ended. I had a death in the family. I do appr. your expertise. I came into some money and before putting it all away I wanted to do something nice for myself. I wanted it to last me many years to come as well. so I went overboard in some areas, I guess. I've always been interested in computers starting with the old 3 and 486s. I def fell out of the loop around 02 or so. Recently I started upgrading cpu's and ram in some older systems and that's where I caught the bug again. I thought to myself, I can build one of these. I didn't realize I had a mid-range motherboard but for the price I should've guessed. It started out to be about 1,000-1,500-dollar build. Keep in mind this is my first build too. The more I kept looking into parts the more power and money I was spending. It ended up working its way towards 4 grand after some peripherals added after the first original compellation. I guess I left the motherboard behind after choosing other more powerful components. I used parts picker to make sure everything was compatible, and I guess while it can do that, it's not smart enough to look at the practicality of those choices. When I get back to that machine, I'll pull the second set of ram and try an overclocking preset one more time. I certainly don't understand this enough to enter my own parameters. One more question tho, why would a motherboard and ram advertise speeds they can't reach. I would think that's false advertisement. Or is it just I don't have the correct configuration to achieve such numbers. I can't even remember now what speed it's running at but I would think even tho I can't top out, I would be able to do a little better than where it was. Again, thank you for your insight.

Why would it be false advertisement? I'm quite certain their marketing material doesn't say guarantee it'll reach those speeds when paired with a different kit of RAM that it has not been tested with. It's like complaining your car company lied about the fuel efficiency because you use more gas than advertised while driving aggressively or towing a trailer. Again, identically branded RAM is not actually identical because nobody has the ability to produce truly identical RAM ever.
 

Kona45primo

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Jan 16, 2021
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The max advertised ram speedn is never guaranteed, but can be reached often.

If it's your first build consider it a success so far. It booted and you didn't break anything in the process. I'd call that a win :)

Do try 2 stick only at first, try to make sure they are from the same paired kit. Normally when running 4 sticks you want to buy them in a Quad 4 stick kit. You may find that it'll only run with 2 sticks at the rated speed with XMP on. Running 4 sticks is life walking 4 dogs at once for the CPU mem controller. Easier when the dogs are trained (4 stick kits) and can get difficult when not.
 

dverdier

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Dec 10, 2022
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That Makes sense. I haven't gotten around to it but I do plan to take a pair out. I had no doubts about things working. I'm pretty good at that kind of stuff. Deeper more complex settings however, is something I'm only beginning to learn. And coding, forget about it. I can thank lynus tech tips for my renewal in interest in computers again. Thank all of you for your advice. I'm about to leave town for a while tom but when I get around to trying this I'll post my results. I'm pretty sure I can do better with 64 at qdvertized speeds than 128 at whichever I'm running at. I think it was 4 something. I have a game running on that pc at the moment that I've taken a break from and for some reason I've lost the capability to hit the windows button and pull up cpuid. I'm almost afraid what I'm going to find when I exit the game.