Help choosing a memory upgrade for my B450 please

apple_man77

apple_man77

apple_man77

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Hello,

I'm trying to upgrade my 4 year old PC without going crazy with the hope of being able to play City Skylines 2, probably on lowish settings, and just give it a general boost until I go AM5.

I've got a B450 TOMAHAWK MAX motherboard and have just upgraded the CPU to a Ryzen 7 5800X.

I'm now wanting to swap my memory for something hopefully a little quicker and from 16gb to 32gb which seems to be the minimum now a days.

I'm currently running some Patriot Viper DDR4 25600 CL16 MEMORY (8GB X 2)

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I'm not quite sure what my best route is now...

Add 2 more identical sticks of ram to give me 32gb

Swap to 2 x 16gb ram of something different / slightly quicker

I don't need anything with fancy lights etc just something thats stable / quick and possibly works with the XMP boost on my mobo. Max I want to spend is £100...I was looking at this https://www.overclockers.co.uk/cors...-25600c18-3600mhz-dual-channel-my-4d1-cs.html but not sure if theres anything better before going ahead.

Many thanks for any help
 
I'm not quite sure what my best route is now...

Add 2 more identical sticks of ram to give me 32gb

Swap to 2 x 16gb ram of something different / slightly quicker
Click to expand...
You’d be better off getting the 2 by 16gig kit and selling your current set.

It’ll be easier to run 2 DIMM modules and you might get a slightly different revision which will hamper compatibility.

Get the Viper Steel 32gig 3600 MT/s kit - it’ll be the best option that I know of, it’ll use Samsung B die and at default EXPO speeds, run in a 1:1 ratio with the Infinity fabric (which runs at 1800 mhz).

3600 MT/s speed is handy because if you bork your overclock attempt and can’t be bothered to fix it that night because you want to play PUBG and just get blocked, you can just enable the default overclock and carry on.
 
As above, dual 16GB puts less pressure on the memory controller than 4 x RAM sticks would.
Revision also a factor. Even buying two dual kits at the same time isn’t guaranteed to be exact same specs.
If you manage to get a B-grade 8Pack 3600 low CL or similar you’re gold. 3200MHz low CL may be fine.
 
I was running 2x8gb 8 pack 3200/14 on my B450 tomahawk, added another 2 sticks of the same ram I got for £35 off MM and even managed to overclock to 3733mhz.
Screenshot-713.png
 
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I'm hoping the XMP settings in my BIOS overclock the memory as I don't have a clue what I'm doing with overclocking/memory timings etc.

I've had a first play on City Skylines 2 tonight and set the gfx on medium and it ran well so hopefully a but more RAM will help and then just a gfx card upgrade in a few months :-)
 
JollyJamma said:
You’d be better off getting the 2 by 16gig kit and selling your current set.

It’ll be easier to run 2 DIMM modules and you might get a slightly different revision which will hamper compatibility.

Get the Viper Steel 32gig 3600 MT/s kit - it’ll be the best option that I know of, it’ll use Samsung B die and at default EXPO speeds, run in a 1:1 ratio with the Infinity fabric (which runs at 1800 mhz).

3600 MT/s speed is handy because if you bork your overclock attempt and can’t be bothered to fix it that night because you want to play PUBG and just get blocked, you can just enable the default overclock and carry on.
Click to expand...
That's the memory I am currently looking at.
FYI the support page for your motherboard will have a compatibility list for memory.
 
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