Ryzen - should I be forcing RAM to 3600 MHz in BIOS

dirtychinchilla · 10 Nov 2020 at 10:27

As per the title really. I have a Ryzen 3600 and 3600 MHz RAM. Looking in the BIOS, it appears to have set itself to 2666 Mhz automatically. Should I be forcing it to 3600 MHz in the BIOS?

Not really very familiar with the workings of RAM so your guidance would be much appreciated

dirtychinchilla · 10 Nov 2020 at 10:44

bremen1874 said:
Enable XMP.

Simple as that? I guess Memtest would be good to run to check it's actually clocking up?

Edit: I believe I enabled XMP and it's coming up on Memtest as 2667 MHz

dirtychinchilla · 10 Nov 2020 at 10:55

bremen1874 said:
If you’re willing to spend the time you might be able to find more optimised settings, but XMP will get you most of the way there.

I’d only bother with me test if it’s unstable or you’re trying to push the settings beyond XMP.

Hmm well I'm just trying to get the most out of what I paid for to be honest! Maybe I'll do some more research

dirtychinchilla · 10 Nov 2020 at 11:00

bremen1874 said:
Enable XMP and then do your research.

Will do

dirtychinchilla · 10 Nov 2020 at 13:46

I just tried running MaxxMem2 on the RAM before and after enabled the A-XMP. It seems that it has worked, which isn't too surprising I guess!

Run with A-XMP disabled:

READ 27913 MByte/s
WRITE 21302 MByte/s
COPY 33012 MByte/s
LATENCY 84.2 ns

Run with A-XMP disabled:

READ 32228 MByte/s
WRITE 27446 MByte/s
COPY 37744 MByte/s
LATENCY 74.0 ns

So the gains are real! Averages at a 15% improvement, but the write speeds went up 22%!

As far as use case goes, I basically just play games on this computer, but I do like tinkering and it will get overclocked once I've got all the cooling properly sorted.

I'm just glad to see it's working as it should.

dirtychinchilla · 10 Nov 2020 at 14:00

SonicSW20 said:
If its stable with XMP enabled (it should be), then I'd just leave it. You can potentially spend hours to unlock that final few percent via manual tuning, unless you have a specific need for it as highlighted by @Bravetart above its really not worth spending the time, enjoy it as is.

Yeah to be honest, I'm quite happy with it now. I just want to check the timings are correct.

In parallel with the comments about usage case, I just ran 3DMark to see what difference it has made and the answer is absolutely none!