AR Fatal1ty 970 Performance- RAM compatibility

I may be a little bit sorry for posting the above rant, a LITTLE bit, but jeepers man ..........

We just can not go through life so rapidly blaming others if only due to the faults of our own.

dinin70 wrote: However, while playing Endless Space (CPU intensive, GPU absolutely not intensive) I suffered a freeze after 90 minutes, but not a simple freeze where nothing moved. My screen looked like this... http://imgur.com/OhKM0xu   It's not the first time it happens. Any clue?

Your video card causing that image. I suggest you check the temps of the GPU. Shearing and tearing are card related.

PetrolHead wrote: It seems weird that a motherboard manufacturer would suggest using a setup that might perform worse."

It is weird! Maybe for the sake of compatibility?

For example, some excerpts of MB manuals:

970 Performance:
"Please install the memory module into DDR3_A2 and DDR3_B2 slots for the first priority."

Sabertooth 990FX R2.0:
"Recommended memory configurations"
Single Channel: DIMM_A2
Dual Channel: DIMM_A2 + DIMM_B2

At least at Auto, CMD Rate would most likely be 2T, forcing 1T to be unstable, depending on modules and speed set.

It seems weird that a motherboard manufacturer would suggest using a setup that might perform worse. I would instead expect the lower RAM speeds having to do with how much load is put on the IMC, but even in this case the effect of the total amount of available slots seems a bit odd.

And yes, the anandtech article's conclusion does somewhat reflect that general conclusion (although it does add "unless you compare over large MHz ranges"), but if you look at the measurements - and especially if you don't use an IGP - you'll see that the results are far less clear cut. A lot of the results show an insignificant performance differences between the whole range of MHz and CL, especially if you don't include the measurements that can be considered statistical outliers. Even in cases like WinRAR and the h264 HD benchmark, where the trend seems to be pretty clear, you may find that 1866 MHz CL 11 is as fast as 2666 MHz CL10, or that at 2666 MHz the latency doesn't seem to matter, at 2400 MHz lower is better but at 2800 MHz higher was better.

It occured to me that maybe there should be a separate thread for this discussion. Could one of the admins transfer at least these latest messages over to the OC Technical Discussion sub-forum into a new thread and name the thread accordingly, maybe "RAM Clock Speed and Latency"?

WKjun wrote: AMD's "stock" value is 1866 since the FX line of CPUs.

That's only true for FX CPUs if the motherboard has two available slots in total. If it has four, and even if you're only using two of them, then the stock value is 1600 MHz. If any of the used modules is dual rank, then the stock value is 1333 MHz. AMD's values are likely conservative, however.

Many people say, RAM frequency should be favoured to timings.

In some cases this may be true. There are a lot of variables, however, such as: Intel or AMD, IGP or dedicated GPU, what is the used application and what sort of frequency and latency differences are on the table. For example in this test some applications clearly benefitted from faster memory, some applications didn't really care and for some the sweet spot was one of the slower settings.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell


Edited by PetrolHead - 13 Jan 2016 at 10:20am