PC Tech Thread

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Polygon

Anyone care to answer this to save me some time digging around in manuals

I've secced a computer with:

AMD Ryzen 9 5950x processor
ASUS® ROG STRIX X570-F GAMING motherboard
and currently 4 x 16GB Ram

Person A says this will not be optimal because the processor has 2 memory channels
Person B says it doesn't matter because the Ram is divided in to Channel 1 A/B and Channel 2 A/B

Who's correct?

MB specs seem to say 4 sticks is fine

4 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR4 *4400(O.C)/4266(O.C.)/4133(O.C.)/4000(O.C.)/3866(O.C.)/3600(O.C.)/3400(O.C.)/3200(O.C.)/3000(O.C.)/2800(O.C.)/2666/2400/2133
MHz ECC and non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory *
4 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR4 3600(O.C.)/3400(O.C.)/3200(O.C.)/3000(O.C.)/2800(O.C.)/2666/2400/2133
MHz ECC and non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory
4 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR4 3200(O.C.)/3000(O.C.)/2800(O.C.)/2666/2400/2133 MHz ECC and non-ECC,
Un-buffered Memory
3rd Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors 2nd and 1st Gen AMD Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics Processors Dual Channel
Memory Architecture

Edit: it's Corsair Vengance DDR4 3200Mhz, which I think is Dual Rank, whatever that means, apparently it's relevant

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Velocio in reply to @Polygon
You're into such minutaie that it's all irrelevant.

The CPU has 2 memory channels, meaning the 4 DIMMs work in pairs for the CPU. If you only have 2 DIMMs to put into the machine then they need to go into specific DIMM slots such that each CPU channel gets 1 DIMM. If you have 4 DIMMs then 2 supply the 2 CPU memory channels.

But there is no optimal here... it's all good enough.

The more pressing question is whether you want to purchase 4 x 16GB or 2 x 32GB. The latter gives you an upgrade path in future for a small premium now, the former is maxing out the upgrade path for those components... slightly cheaper now but way more expensive to change in future.

The other arguments seem excessively pedantic... memory speed hasn't been a bottle neck for years, the bottlenecks are predominantly storage and network, and then the number of physical cores. You would not notice mild memory differences, only big jumps in total memory volume.

Which is to say that the biggest perfomances differences come from:
1. Faster local storage
2. Faster networking locally and to the internet
3. More physical cores on the CPU
4. More total memory
Exact configuration of RAM and RAM timings and speed isn't as noticeable as anything above, perhaps a +/- 1% difference that you couldn't perceive unless you're running a system at full capacity for a sustained period of time which no-one is (even tasks people think of like that don't use all the things all the time).

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