Intel gear 1 max mem speed

Dallies · 3 Feb 2022 at 16:03

Hi thanks for looking.

Whats the highest speed memory I can use to stay in gear 1? I currently have ddr4 3600 with a 12600KF would that be gear 1 or gear 2? I need to change my memory and someone has suggested that 3600 will be gear 2 and I should go to 3200 but someone else said it should run 3600 gear 1 ?

Thanks.

Ayahuasca · 3 Feb 2022 at 16:26

3600mhz gear 1 works fine on my basic MSI Z690 motherboard. I believe some of the board manufacturers are releasing a bios that will default all 3600mhz or above RAM to gear 2 though, pretty simple to change it back.

Dallies · 3 Feb 2022 at 16:45

Ayahuasca said:
3600mhz gear 1 works fine on my basic MSI Z690 motherboard. I believe some of the board manufacturers are releasing a bios that will default all 3600mhz or above RAM to gear 2 though, pretty simple to change it back.

Thanks.

Am I right in thinking gear 2 drastically reduces my ram performance because the memory controller is at half speed? I didn't know you could select the gear mode, I thought when you get to a certain speed it just automatically goes into gear 2 but I just looked in my bios and you are right. The options are auto, gear 1 or gear 2.
So in theory if i put in some 4000 memory and select gear 1 I'm likely to run into stability issues? Sorry for all these questions this is new to me. I had a workstation ddr3 that served me well for a decade. I decided to upgrade a couple of years ago and it's been hell. 3 amd and a intel system later and I'm still struggling with memory issues.

Ayahuasca · 3 Feb 2022 at 16:51

It will depend on the RAM and how good your IMC is. Pretty sure I’ve seen a few people running gear 1 at the higher frequencies.

Dallies · 3 Feb 2022 at 16:59

Ayahuasca said:
It will depend on the RAM and how good your IMC is. Pretty sure I’ve seen a few people running gear 1 at the higher frequencies.

Ok

I will stick with 3600.

Thanks for the info.