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Intel to launch 6 core Coffee Lake-S CPUs & Z370 chipset 5 October 2017

I would be a little careful just taking averages. For ryzen in bf1 memory speed generally makes little difference. In other games you can get a greater than 10% improvement going from 2133 to 3200. Like many things you need to understand what you are planning to use your machine for.
 
I would be a little careful just taking averages. For ryzen in bf1 memory speed generally makes little difference. In other games you can get a greater than 10% improvement going from 2133 to 3200. Like many things you need to understand what you are planning to use your machine for.
No I understand that. An average is exactly that, it is the average performance across what ever it is they are testing, some will be higher some will be virtually nothing.

Just for comparison here is Anandtech's article they have only done memory speed and will have a follow up article focusing on timings. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11857/memory-scaling-on-ryzen-7-with-team-groups-night-hawk-rgb
It is pretty clear to see that Ryzen can be fairly dependant on memory frequency, but it depends very much on the sort of test and the nature of the workload on memory accesses. On the benchmarks where it matters, our memory kit was above to push performance up and over 20%, although despite the few benchmarks where this happened, it was outnumbered by benchmarks that had zero or a very minor effect. Some gaming titles had up to a 5-10% difference in average frame rates, but others had zero change.

Depending on how the results are digested, and how the software can effectively use the new AMD Zen microarchitecture, a relatively decent set of DDR4-3000 (or there abouts) memory seems to be a good inflection point for users that want to invest in faster memory. Obviously using tighter sub-timimgs should help as well, which we'll likely explore in a separate review.
 
From what I've tried, timings seem to be a lot more important for Ryzen. A lot of the <2666Mhz vs >3200Mhz comparisons that show big differences are done with the <2666Mhz using pretty slow timings while >3200Mhz using fast ones, not really a big surprise.
I think the same probably holds true for Coffee Lake, can probably get more out a kit by getting the lowest timings possible on it instead of going for higher frequency.
 
They will be doing a timings test but so far we have a similar trend. You're largely talking single digit benefits so if that appeals then go for it.

Some games do seem to show nice improvements though.

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Has that guy ever published what timings he's using for VLL and LL? I remember he's using a pretty expensive Team Xtreem kit.
2666 to 3600 both on C16 (I presume same subtimings?) also seem to be pretty close together.
Either way he's a bit of an outlier given that his benches don't really match with a lot of the traditional outlet ones.
 
He's using Stilt's timing's. https://goo.gl/h47tRz

Like I said we can only go by what we have. Both techpowerup and Anandtech give virtually the same conclusions. So far it shows that memory doesn't make as much difference in the real world as perhaps some may believe, unless you use memory intensive applications.
 
Not that many B-dies can do the fast Stilt timings, so more or less if you get lucky with a regular B-die kit or if you open your wallet to get a Team Xtreem, and even then it's also going to depend on the IMC silicon lottery.
As relevant, if not worse than the MCE testing some outlets do since that's a pipe-dream for most systems.
 
Which is why both techpowerup and anandtech both say that for ryzen at least 3000mhz is likely the sweetspot. After that you're spending money for small returns.

Now techpowerup has also shown it to be similar for coffeelake, although coffeelake is a bit more forgiving your also going into diminishing returns for your money.
 
Yeah, as long as you don't have a 1080 Ti, you're going to be fine with whatever's cheapest around the 3000Mhz mark, both on Coffee and Ryzen.

Even with a 1080 Ti you're probably not missing much if you keep to 3200 C14.
 
Dude it's a real world scenario not everyone has 1080ti's and not everyone games at 1080p. If you have a 1080ti or titan xp then spending a few extra quid on faster ram for small benefits is likely not an issue, in the real world it's potentially money better spent elsewhere.
 
I also found this which goes into a bit more detail with memory frequency and timings.

I was the one who told you about the latency being an issue holding back ryzen because of the Fabric running at Ram frequency. It was very funny, I was trying to spread that message at Overclock.net and was being told I was an Idiot 3 months ago. I am laughing down my sleeve now as everyone is talking about latency and timings.

The extra bandwidth in GB/s above 3200 doesn't really help that much for extra performance. Kits that are rated at higher frequencies and can be used as you have to keep latencies low by dropping the kit to run slower but tighter. 4000mhz kits are not worth spending the money on unless you can turn the binning to your advantage, running the ram at lower frequencies but with much tighter timings, given that 4000mhz kits are rated at CL18 and CL19 they are not actually that fast to start with compared to the 3200c14, 3600cl15 or CL16 kits making the slower kits a much better buy. When 4500 becomes an available product then the ultra high kits will give Ryzen better performance as their native latency will be around 8ns but they will initially be cost prohibitive.

One thing that you didnt mention is that all ram has a native latency that you can calculate from the timings and it can be helpful in deciding what direction to take in setting up you system memory. The formula is (CAS setting/Kit MTs rating) x 2000 or you can use (CAS/actual frequency Mhz) x 1000 ad the DDR4 kits are double data rate kits. The actual frequency that the Infinity Fabric is using is half of what the kit states. the 2000 takes this into account so you don need to remember to divide the kit speed in two.

18/4000 x 2000 = 9 ns
16/3600 x 2000 = 8.89ns
14/3466 x 2000 = 8.08ns
14/3200 x 2000 = 8.75ns
12/3200 x 2000 = 7.5ns

You can see that your kit at 3466 is better than the kit at 3600c16 or 4000c18. If you can get your system to boot and run with your Ram kit set at 3200 CL12 settings, you should find even more performance in gaming.

If you divide the result by the cas setting, it will tell you how many nanoseconds each cycle tales. The infinity fabric transfers data between CCX modules, memory controllers and PCIe controllers at the rate of 32 bytes per cycle. Remember that if you want to convert everything to nanoseconds to investigate the component parts of system latency, Cache memory on Ryzen is running at CPU frequency and not ram frequency so the number of cycles cache memory takes to get a 4ns L2 cache latency is different from the number of cycles it takes for the system RAM to do something in 4ns. When you measure system latency the path is L1+L2_L3 cache then the time it tales the system ram for do its stuff based on these timings.

You may find though that as latency decreases with really tight timings, there is a cross over point where multithreaded performance multiplier efficiency over single core performance starts to drop off. The key is to find the best compromise between latency and multi thread performance. The idle period of time where the CPU primary thread on a core is queued up waiting for memory access because of latency gives the secondary SMT thread access to CPU time to do its process work. That is why the Ryzen chips mutlithreaded performance tends to scale better over their single core scores than Intel chips do. Intel hyper thread efficiency is about 25% vs Ryzen getting almost 50%. You can check the multiplier using the single and multi core scores in cinebench.

BTW for Witcher 3 and Watchdogs 2, you might like to try setting the CPU affinity for the game processes to just use CPU8-CPU16 and see how that performs compared to the 7700K. you should see a boost in performance
 
received my 8700k last tuesday but wasn't about to build and test until the weekend. anyhow, what I managed was a stable 5.0ghz at 1.330v. On air with a Noctua NH-D15 my max temps during stress test's were 79c. Idle is about 30c and about 40-50 while gaming. AVX Workloads were getting a bit uncomfortable though so i set a -2 offset to keep it in check!.

gaming wise, i'm impressed. with a 1080ti im finally hitting 100 - 144 fps in PUBG @ 1440p

I'm using the Gigabyte Ultra Gaming z370 if anyone is interested.

All in all im pleased with the chip. I was considering de-lidding and maybe a kraken x62 but i think this will suffice :D
 
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Read the article.
I already did, I was enforcing the point I made earlier. Blindly saying "Because they say so" is why the media get away with being as lacking as they are.

I also found this which goes into a bit more detail with memory frequency and timings.

tCAS isn't the only thing that denotes memory performance. In fact, it doesn't have as much of an impact on modern architectures as it used to in days of old. When encompassing everything when measuring gaming performance, you'll see there are gains beyond what the article show. If I get time, I will show some data. Whether those gains negate the cost of faster memory is subjective. There are no huge jumps in performance on the memory subsystem in any workload.
 
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received my 8700k last tuesday but wasn't about to build and test until the weekend. anyhow, what I managed was a stable 5.0ghz at 1.330v. On air with a Noctua NH-D15 my max temps during stress test's were 79c. Idle is about 30c and about 40-50 while gaming. AVX Workloads were getting a bit uncomfortable though so i set a -2 offset to keep it in check!.

gaming wise, i'm impressed. with a 1080ti im finally hitting 100 - 144 fps in PUBG @ 1440p

I'm using the Gigabyte Ultra Gaming z370 if anyone is interested.

All in all im pleased with the chip. I was considering de-lidding and maybe a kraken x62 but i think this will suffice :D
I've been struggling a bit with my Asrock Extreme4 - anything over 4.7GHz needs 1.4V and one review found it was only stable at 5GHz with 1.42V. The thermals are too high for my liking at those voltages.

The NH-D15 is doing the business at 4.7GHz and 1.38V. Temperatures at around 72c during stress tests and under 60c during gaming.
 
I've been struggling a bit with my Asrock Extreme4 - anything over 4.7GHz needs 1.4V and one review found it was only stable at 5GHz with 1.42V. The thermals are too high for my liking at those voltages.

The NH-D15 is doing the business at 4.7GHz and 1.38V. Temperatures at around 72c during stress tests and under 60c during gaming.

Yeah, I don't think i'd be comfortable leaving at 1.4 either. adaptive voltage could work for you under realistic workloads mind. I'd actually like to use adaptive voltage myself ( for idle times) but i found it giving way more too much voltage than was required. I tired to use adaptive with my current profile but it was overshooting.
 
I've been struggling a bit with my Asrock Extreme4 - anything over 4.7GHz needs 1.4V and one review found it was only stable at 5GHz with 1.42V. The thermals are too high for my liking at those voltages.

The NH-D15 is doing the business at 4.7GHz and 1.38V. Temperatures at around 72c during stress tests and under 60c during gaming.

i have this mb too the extreme4 seems to require a bit more voltage than other motherboards. i have 4.8 ghz on all cores stable with voltage 1.25 and cache ratio 4.4. . And I found that it was important to set avx ratio ofset to 2 disable speedstep and speed spectrum to keep temps down while testing in prime. i needed 1.38v to hit 4.9 which didnt seem worth the extra temps to me for such a small gain
 
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