B450 5950x + 4 ram sticks.... Advice required

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Hi all.

I've been running a b450 tomahawk max, 3600 and 16gb of 3600 cas14 B-die (team group 8pack) for quite some time.

Having the itch to upgrade I picked up a 5950x from the MM.

Updated my BIOS and it all worked great but I found that I was now limited by my 16gb of ram rather than my 3600.
This was no great suprise and I bought another two sticks of identical b-die for an ok price, I think 32gb will be ok for the moment.

Although I knew I might have problems running 4 sticks of ram on b450 it's worse than I expected.
Won't even post at xmp and it just crashed in timespy at 3200 CAS 14 (xmp with the speed reduced)

Should I just switch to a x570 board?

Buy two sticks of 16gb ram?

Can I tweak timings or voltages to make 4 sticks work on b450?

Thanks for any advice.
 
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First .

I would try set all 4 manually at 3200mhz CAS 16-18-18-38 Timings, 1.35v to try and get all 4 stable . if no luck either increase the voltage up to 1.45v or lower frequency to 3000mhz .
 
Soldato
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You could try increasing the SOC voltage, it normally defaults around 1.1 but up to 1.2 is fine and generally needs a bit more when trying to run 4 sticks.

At worse you could always just return the 16gb kit you just bought and grab a 2x32gb kit then sell the other 16gb kit.
 
Soldato
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Although I knew I might have problems running 4 sticks of ram on b450 it's worse than I expected.

Running four RAM modules on a B450 is not hard, its the IMC on the CPU that matters. What voltage is the RAM running at and what speeds? The SOC may need a bump to allow the chance to boot. I'd set it to 2133 MHz first and see if you can get all four modules to boot first and then go from there.
 
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I tried swapping the modules around and completely reset the BIOS.

Now it seems stable at 3200 c14,15,15,35 1.45v
(Timespy stress test)

Maybe I didn't have one stick seated property before. It is a bit awkward with my nd15 cooler

This is the ram
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...3600mhz-dual-channel-kit-black-my-001-8p.html

I'm going to give it a try at 3266mhz now.

The new sticks did run ok at xmp as I swapped them with my old ones and ran the new ram alone to check it before I tried 4 sticks.

Thanks for all the help.

I'll keep increasing frequency and then see if more SOC helps.
 
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Crashed at 3266mhz.

I checked SOC voltage in the BIOS and it's already 1.205v..

I'll try 1.5v on the memory.

I might have to accept 3200 as the maximum, but I'm supprised I've lost so much...
 
Soldato
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Crashed at 3266mhz.

I checked SOC voltage in the BIOS and it's already 1.205v..

I'll try 1.5v on the memory.

I might have to accept 3200 as the maximum, but I'm supprised I've lost so much...
Try 1.1 and 1.15 for SOC as sometimes too much can also cause issues.

What are the VDDG CCD / IOD voltages that the board is setting and do you have gear down mode on in the timings?
 
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Try 1.1 and 1.15 for SOC as sometimes too much can also cause issues.

What are the VDDG CCD / IOD voltages that the board is setting?

Is RAM like CPU's in the respect that you won't know how fast it goes until you tweak it or are XMP profiles roughly your limit ?

Does this depend on the RAM ?
 
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Is RAM like CPU's in the respect that you won't know how fast it goes until you tweak it or are XMP profiles roughly your limit ?

Does this depend on the RAM ?

Even xmp is overclocking, so it's not guaranteed to work.

These sticks have very tight timings and a high (ish) voltage at xmp, so there probably isn't much more scope to tweak.

A lot of ram will have more conservative xmp profiles with more potential for faster speeds.
Ram overclocking probably has more potential gains available than CPU overclocking these days as CPU are much smarter than they used to be with boosting.

Ram overclocking is a pain and I'd rather just run xmp. Unfortunately that's not an option for me any more.

System passed memtest run overnight at 3200, I'll try some looser timings after work tonight.
 
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As I said above you could just have a poor IMC that can't do 4 modules at more than 3200MHz, assume they are all single rank?

I think all 8gb B-die are single rank, but ocuk site does not say anything.

I think my previous crashes were due to running 1T timing, resetting the BIOS would have put it into gear down as the auto setting.
 
Soldato
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I think all 8gb B-die are single rank, but ocuk site does not say anything.

I think my previous crashes were due to running 1T timing, resetting the BIOS would have put it into gear down as the auto setting.
Does that MSI board have 'Memory Try It'? - I got LPX 3600 to work at 4000 (4 x 8GB) at 1.450v I think.
 
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Does that MSI board have 'Memory Try It'? - I got LPX 3600 to work at 4000 (4 x 8GB) at 1.450v I think.

It does have memory try it.

I'm going to try 3600 at the worst timings (c18) and try lowering them if 3600 slow is stable.

That's s good suggestion for people like me who don't normally bother with this stuff.
 
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So 3600 16,18,18,18,36 crashed

But 3600 16,19,19,19,36 was ok with a quick timespy run.

Voltage was at 1.4, so I'll increase it to 1.45 and try again with the lower timings.

I'll also try lower SOC voltage.

Edit -
3600 16 18 18 18 36 was ok at 1.45v
Running a stress test to double check.

At these settings I'm getting a higher timespy score than previously due to the extra ram.
 
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SOC voltage and xmp is confusing.

With xmp on soc was at 1.2v
Xmp off and it drops back to 1.1v and I didn't notice.

So I'm now running 3600 16 16 16 16 36 gear down with 1.5v and 1.2 SOC.

Seems stable so far.

Thanks again for all the help, this would have been much more frustrating without ocuk forums.
 
Soldato
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SOC voltage and xmp is confusing.

With xmp on soc was at 1.2v
Xmp off and it drops back to 1.1v and I didn't notice.

So I'm now running 3600 16 16 16 16 36 gear down with 1.5v and 1.2 SOC.

Seems stable so far.

Thanks again for all the help, this would have been much more frustrating without ocuk forums.
Glad you are up and running.
 
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