Poor Quad Channel Performance

Nik81 · 19 Jul 2019 at 01:50

First of all good to be here, haven't purchased anything from OCUK in a couple of years but i hope that's not an issue.

Anyways i decided to post here because GB doesn't even reply in their forums so perhaps someone here can give me an idea of what's happening.

I own an 7900X along with an GB X299 Aorus Gaming 9 and for the past 3 months or so i was dumb enough to have my RAM (i have two kits here, Crucial Ballistix Elite 4x16GB and Crucial Ballistix Sport 4x8GB) configured in Dual Channel mode instead of Quad Channel.

So 3 days ago when i found out i configured them in Quad Channel Mode and to my surprise my benchmark results on Passmark, MaxMemm2 and Sandra Platinum Lite were around 20-30% inferior to when i had the RAM configured in dual channel mode.

I also tried Memtest from a bootable CD, all tests passed on both kits.

Ideas? This has been driving me crazy. I know the Aorus Gaming 9 is not the best X299 mainboard out there but Quad Channel not working properly?

Anyways thanks in advance for any input.

Hotwired · 19 Jul 2019 at 02:18

Aren't the sticks meant to be identical. For preference a quad channel kit but if not, the same model.

The further you go from a tested kit of 4/8 sticks the more risk they won't work together as I understand.

Wait nvm, thought you were mixing two different types not 4 sticks of each.

Nik81 · 19 Jul 2019 at 15:34

Hotwired said:
Aren't the sticks meant to be identical. For preference a quad channel kit but if not, the same model.

The further you go from a tested kit of 4/8 sticks the more risk they won't work together as I understand.

Wait nvm, thought you were mixing two different types not 4 sticks of each.

Yeah, 4 identical ones of each of the two models i have here.

So am i the only one to ever have this issue?

Vince · 19 Jul 2019 at 15:36

@GIGA-Man One for you buddy - Time to poke those on the giga forums

@Nik81 - Giga-man is the ocuk gigabyte rep and a top bloke! Also what are you using to test memory performance? I could run some on my quad channel system but being AMD im not sure they would even be remotely comparable.

Nik81 · 19 Jul 2019 at 16:21

Vince said:
@GIGA-Man One for you buddy - Time to poke those on the giga forums

@Nik81 - Giga-man is the ocuk gigabyte rep and a top bloke! Also what are you using to test memory performance? I could run some on my quad channel system but being AMD im not sure they would even be remotely comparable.

Passmark Performance Test 9, MaxMemm2 and Sandra Platinum Lite.

I have checked numbers by other people plus like i said in dual channel mode i get 20-30% higher numbers.

Vince · 19 Jul 2019 at 16:28

Nik81 said:
Passmark Performance Test 9, MaxMemm2 and Sandra Platinum Lite.

I have checked numbers by other people plus like i said in dual channel mode i get 20-30% higher numbers.

Higher numbers on what though? Latency or throughput? I'd almost expect quad channel to have a latency penalty over dual channel. If you could do some screenshots with the difference I would expect many more people to weigh in

For what it's worth you would expect quad channel to have more bandwidth than dual but at higher latency, dual would have lower latency and lower bandwidth at the same frequencies.

Nik81 · 19 Jul 2019 at 16:45

Vince said:
Higher numbers on what though? Latency or throughput? I'd almost expect quad channel to have a latency penalty over dual channel. If you could do some screenshots with the difference I would expect many more people to weigh in

For what it's worth you would expect quad channel to have more bandwidth than dual but at higher latency, dual would have lower latency and lower bandwidth at the same frequencies.

That's the issue, i get less numbers in EVERYTHING.

For example PassMark got me an overall score of 2395 with Quad and 3098 in Dual.

MaxMemm2 read was above 11k with Dual now its at 8k with Quad. Likewise write was at over 22k with Dual now its at just over 18k with Quad.

Even worse results in Sandra Platinum Lite, around 48Gb/s with Dual and 16Gb/s with Quad.

This makes no sense. I hope the GB guy knows if there's an option in the Bios i haven't chosen or something like that.

(Don't know why my text got black)

Vince · 19 Jul 2019 at 16:47

Nik81 said:
That's the issue, i get less numbers in EVERYTHING.

For example PassMark got me an overall score of 2395 with Quad and 3098 in Dual.

MaxMemm2 read was above 11k with Dual now its at 8k with Quad. Likewise write was at over 22k with Dual now its at just over 18k with Quad.

Even worse results in Sandra Platinum Lite, around 48Gb/s with Dual and 16Gb/s with Quad.

This makes no sense. I hope the GB guy knows if there's an option in the Bios i haven't chosen or something like that.

(Don't know why my text got black)

Question- do the clock speeds/timings step down significantly in quad channel? Those numbers do look way, way off.

Nik81 · 19 Jul 2019 at 17:17

Vince said:
Question- do the clock speeds/timings step down significantly in quad channel? Those numbers do look way, way off.

Nope, same timings and speed (XMP is used in both cases).

Someone told me that the mainboard may be changing timings on its own and i may not be able to see that but both CPUZ and MaxMemm2 report the same timings.

Vince · 19 Jul 2019 at 17:22

Nik81 said:
Nope, same timings and speed (XMP is used in both cases).

Someone told me that the mainboard may be changing timings on its own and i may not be able to see that but both CPUZ and MaxMemm2 report the same timings.

Really odd some screenshots CPU-z etc from both quad and dual would be helpful I am sure!

bremen1874 · 19 Jul 2019 at 17:24

Have you tried the two sets separately in quad channel? That would give you something to compare the results with all 8 sticks to.

Nik81 · 19 Jul 2019 at 18:08

bremen1874 said:
Have you tried the two sets separately in quad channel? That would give you something to compare the results with all 8 sticks to.

Yeap, more or less same performance levels (even though one kit is at 3200MHz and the other at 3000MHz).
I can try to pair them to use all 8 modules but seeing these are different models i don't know if they will even work.

Vince said:
Really odd some screenshots CPU-z etc from both quad and dual would be helpful I am sure!

Coming up.

bremen1874 · 19 Jul 2019 at 18:10

Nik81 said:
Yeap, more or less same performance levels (even though one kit is at 3200MHz and the other at 3000MHz).
I can try to pair them to use all 8 modules but seeing these are different models i don't know if they will even work.

As the motherboard has 8 slots it wasn't very clear (to myself at least) whether you were trying to use them all together or not.

Nik81 · 19 Jul 2019 at 18:37

bremen1874 said:
As the motherboard has 8 slots it wasn't very clear (to myself at least) whether you were trying to use them all together or not.

No, each kit has 4 modules so i am testing things with those seperately.

Here you can see three CPUZ pictures along with the benchmarks, two are in Dual Mode (this mainboard has two different ways to put modules in dual mode) and one Quad (used the 32GB kit but the same happens with the 64GB kit).

To my Surprise i swapped my 7900X for an 7980XE to see if it was the CPU fault and now Dual and Quad are at the same performance levels (again doesn't make sense however).

Nik81 · 20 Jul 2019 at 09:55

Anyone?

Vince · 20 Jul 2019 at 11:50

Nik81 said:
Anyone?

I can't help with why this is happening on your intel platform sadly but I can tell you that your memory performance is just pants! I ran some of your benchmarks on my machine with my "safe" esxi clocks so totally stock 2133mhz memory and this is what I got:

Dude looking at your scores things don't tie up. The passmark benchmarks suggest much higher performance than "maxxMem"

Nik81 · 20 Jul 2019 at 11:59

Vince said:
I can't help with why this is happening on your intel platform sadly but I can tell you that your memory performance is just pants! I ran some of your benchmarks on my machine with my "safe" esxi clocks so totally stock 2133mhz memory and this is what I got:

I know my numbers are messed up, the thing is i don't know if it's an BIOS setting i need to use.

20 years working with computers, first time i had such an issue.

Vince · 20 Jul 2019 at 12:11

Nik81 said:
I know my numbers are messed up, the thing is i don't know if it's an BIOS setting i need to use.

20 years working with computers, first time i had such an issue.

Yea I was trying to work out if it was just one benchmark that was all over the place but that maxxmem does seem to scale properly with system changes, I just changed my memory to 3200 cas 16 1t and gave it another go:

Hopefully somebody from gigabyte will look and tell us what is normal.

Nik81 · 20 Jul 2019 at 12:12

Vince said:
Yea I was trying to work out if it was just one benchmark that was all over the place but that maxxmem does seem to scale properly with system changes, I just changed my memory to 3200 cas 16 1t and gave it another go:

Hopefully somebody from gigabyte will look and tell us what is normal.

Not much faith in GB, posted the same question in their USA support forums 3 days ago, still no reply.

Makes me wish i had gotten an ASUS or EVGA mainboard

Nik81 · 21 Jul 2019 at 09:46

@8 Pack Any chance you ever had the same issue? If this is the first you see it also then well then my luck sucks