Question More ram or faster ram?

Johnmac86

Commendable
Apr 28, 2021
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Hay guys just quick question, iv just learned off xmp clocking on my ram of 32g, 8g x 4 but couldn't get the xmp to work. I have two different brands of ram , took one set out and now I can use xmp and takes my ram upto 3200mz and 16g ram. Now am just thinking should I use 32g at 2400mz or 16g at 3200mz until I can get another matching set of ram sticks? Intrigued to hear feedback also it's for gaming 😀 cheers
 
more RAM is generally preferable to faster RAM unless you are using a Ryzen CPU. The reason you likely cannot enable XMP is that having quad-channel memory (4x8gb) puts more stress on the memory controller which is compounded when you enable XMP. I would recommend two 16 GB sticks then enable XMP.
 
more RAM is generally preferable to faster RAM unless you are using a Ryzen CPU. The reason you likely cannot enable XMP is that having quad-channel memory (4x8gb) puts more stress on the memory controller which is compounded when you enable XMP. I would recommend two 16 GB sticks then enable XMP.
Yeah this is what I was thinking tbh so when I come up upgrade ram would you recommend getting 2 16gb sticks?
 
It's a balancing game. More RAM isn't better nor is Purely faster.

Say you have 4 stick of 16GB, that's irrelevant if the speed is only say 2666mhz. It won't perform as well in gaming or task heavy applications.

Same goes for speed. If you have 16GB of 3600mhz, sure it will offer good results until that 16GB inevitably is used up. A lot of games or intensive tasks will eat that 16GB up and bottleneck you.

So speed should be a priority because you can add more next paycheck or whenever if you don't have the funds now. If you go with the full 32GB (recommended) now but it's slow, you can't magically make it faster. And you don't want to mix speeds and ideally stick with the same model when adding more.
 
more vram on gpu is good for game, vram latency and speed is often better than normal ram. so ram speed is important for gaming more than capacity if game doesn't use much ram
 
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Hay guys just quick question, iv just learned off xmp clocking on my ram of 32g, 8g x 4 but couldn't get the xmp to work. I have two different brands of ram , took one set out and now I can use xmp and takes my ram upto 3200mz and 16g ram. Now am just thinking should I use 32g at 2400mz or 16g at 3200mz until I can get another matching set of ram sticks? Intrigued to hear feedback also it's for gaming 😀 cheers
More RAM is only beneficial if you are using 80% or more of your existing RAM. Otherwise faster RAM is better.
 
Higher XMP speeds do not always mean faster operation in some apps. Since we're talking DDR4 here, I dug out an old article from Puget Systems benchmarking the performance of different RAM speeds in Adobe Premiere Pro. For some XMP speed increases, the app speed went down. Obviously a lot depends on the combination of CPU, RAM and application.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...formance-1528/#Premiere_Pro_Benchmark_Results

Starting off with Premiere Pro, the results are quite different than what we expected. Oddly enough, we actually saw slightly worse performance with the higher frequency RAM when using the Intel Core i9 9900K and Core i9 9980XE. The 9900K in particular saw up to a 7% performance drop with DDR4-3000 RAM, but recovered a bit with 3200 and 3600 RAM.

It's interesting to note the fastest benchmark result for the Intel 9980XE was measured with 128GB RAM clocked at only DDR4-2666 CL19, with the slowest benchmark for 32GB RAM at DDR4-3600 CL16. Sometimes more (slow) RAM is better than less (faster) RAM. No doubt this benchmark favoured large amounts of RAM (128GB) over small amounts (32GB).

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xmp profiles are resident in the ram sticks themselves.
They define the settings that allow that particular ram kit to operate at advertised speeds.
With two different kits, the xmp code in each kit may well be different, causing issues since the motherboard must operate all ram with the exact same settings.
With a appropriate motherboard, you will need to find suitable settings yourself.
Running 4 sticks or different kits, will usually involve higher than usual ram voltage settings.

For gaming, ram speed is not of much importance.
An older study:

And since ram in gaming motherboards operates as dual channel only, a 2 x 16gb would be best.