[SOLVED] Is There A Performance Drop Between 3200Mhz vs 2933Mhz

Heat_Fan89

Reputable
Jul 13, 2020
440
211
5,090
This is related to an Alienware Aurora R10 I purchased a few months ago. Here are the system specs:

Ryzen 3800X, Liquid Cooled 1000W PSU, 512 GB Hynix NVME, 8GB HyperX Fury 2933Mhz RAM, RTX 2070 Super. When I bought the machine it was one of those flash deals and it did not allow to upgrade the RAM. So I went on Amazon and bought a HyperX Fury Kit 16x2 @ 3200Mhz. My problems began because of Dell's crappy designs that if I O/C in the BIOS to 3200Mhz, it will run fine but then intermittently I will encounter Cold Boot issues, including NO video or I am sent to the "BIOS Recovery" screen upon startup. If I O/C to 2933Mhz, all of my quirky Boot problems go away.

Now, the HyperX Fury Kit I bought directly from Amazon, I was told by a Dell forum member that they are memory kits from a few yrs ago, and I chose them because they run both 1.2v and 1.35v. The Alienware desktop OEM memory runs at 1.2v but I did not try and manually change the speed timings. I just took the default OC settings i.e. profile 1 in the BIOS.

When I was running the RAM at 3200Mhz I didn't notice if my programs launched quicker or my games felt any faster FPS wise. So my apologies for my long winded question, when it comes to games, is there a BIG difference running the system Memory at 3200Mhz or 2933Mhz?
 
Solution
DDR stands for double data rate. which means it doubles the data rate!! :)

so yah the clock speed is always half. double that (hence double data rate) and you get the "speed" of the ram.

back in the day we used to have single data rate and we needed the ddr to know what type it was. they never dropped the ddr even after single rate ram left the market.

Heat_Fan89

Reputable
Jul 13, 2020
440
211
5,090
Thanks for the confirmation as I didn't notice a performance jump either. However when I remove the OC'ing profile and run the Memory at stock speed and voltage i.e. 2400Mhz and 1.2v there seems to be a drop in getting to the desktop but even at stock speeds the same games seem to run just as smooth.
 
Jul 27, 2021
15
3
15
Hey I don't know much but my lap hits max at 2933 MHz although I installed 2 3200 MHz Ram Sticks. But in CPUZ DRAM Frequency is around 1465 MHz Why is this happening though ?
 

Math Geek

Titan
Ambassador
DDR stands for double data rate. which means it doubles the data rate!! :)

so yah the clock speed is always half. double that (hence double data rate) and you get the "speed" of the ram.

back in the day we used to have single data rate and we needed the ddr to know what type it was. they never dropped the ddr even after single rate ram left the market.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Heat_Fan89
Solution

Heat_Fan89

Reputable
Jul 13, 2020
440
211
5,090
Yeah It is running dual channel, I didn't know it would make the speed into half though it wont be an issue i believe. Thanks for clarifying :)
It's not running at half the speed in reality. Combined, your memory is still running at 2933Mhz. Think of it this way. Memory feeds the CPU information, with single channel it's like running information in 1 lane. With dual channel you just added another lane to the highway so you get twice the information at the same speed. That's why games take a huge performance hit when using just one memory stick because it can't keep up with the CPU and GPU.

If you saw 2933Mhz per memory stick in dual channel then it would be 2933Mhz x 2 = 5866Mhz which wouldn't work because your memory is rated at 2933Mhz and can't operate at the speed.

The purpose of dual channel is to make the flow/volume twice as fast at the same speed. So seeing 1466Mhz in CPUz is correct for dual channel.