Memory Scaling on Ryzen 7 with Team Group's Night Hawk RGB
by Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on September 27, 2017 11:05 AM ESTTeam Group's Night Hawk RGB Memory
16GB of DDR4-3000 CL16 (TF2D416G3000HC16CDC01)
For our testing, Team Group provided us with a dual channel kit from its T-Force Night Hawk RGB range. This is a 2x8 GB kit rated at DDR4-3000 with latency timings of 16-18-18-38. The T-Force Night Hawk DDR4-3000’s are a fairly middle of the road (spec wise) dual channel offering when compared to some of the high-end kits, but the Night Hawk kit comes aims at a much more reasonable balance of price point and performance. With the high-performance kits, the price is paid on the way the memory is binned - with kits like the Night Hawk RGB, there is a small 'RGB tax' over non-RGB mono-color variants, which usually comes in at around $5-$10 depending on the manufacturer. The RGB element is purely for aesthetics, so while on paper and financially it makes less sense to opt for the RGB option over the mono-colored version, our discussions with vendors gave an insight into this market. As far as we were told, RGB sales are growing faster than anyone ever expected - system design customisability is becoming an important consideration of a PC build.
For the memory itself, Team Group has gone with a rather eccentric hawk inspired heatsink design as the brand. The modules end up 1.73”/44mm in height, so for context, the Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler has a clearance for memory of up to 45mm, so this kit should just about fit.
Under the heat sinks, Team Group has opted to use single sided Samsung B-die ICs. These memory ICs are highly favoured by extreme overclockers for their potential overclockability and frequency scaling, as well as the ability to really tighten the latencies; at very high frequencies and tight latencies, some of the more synthetic tests that competitive overclockers love make a difference, and memory manufacturers use that as a marketing tool when it comes to B-die. That being said, despite sending us a memory kit using B-die, Team Group did say however that in future it could change the ICs in the kits depending on market pricing and availability of such modules. This is disappointing, but not completely unexpected as other companies also do this. Our normal policy applies when this is the case: if this were to occur, we would want the model number would change to reflect this. There are attempts online by competitive overclockers to identify which memory modules use certain ICs, so if one model number had several IC versions, it would be very confusing to organise.
The Team Group T-Force Night Hawk RGB DDR4-3000 kit comes with a global lifetime guarantee in the US, and supports RGB LED customisation. This particular kit is synchronizable with ASUS motherboards via ASUS Aura Sync. The purpose of platforms like Aura Sync is to allow users looking to colour match their existing products through products such as peripherals, motherboards, VGA and even RGB LED strips such as BitFenix’s Alchemy range and virtually all of Cablemod’s current line-up.
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HStewart - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
I think of this way, AMD was desperate to get back into business of CPU's, but financially they had some issues to really think it though. So they created an 8 Core Zen and then clunk them together so that they claim higher core count. This designed is likely primary why it does not scaled.But they did something that they probably didn't want to here - they ignored that Intel has been making higher core CPU's in the Xeon and that it quite simple for them to place them in gaming machines. This has a good side effect for Intel owners, because it means it keeps Intel on its toes - but the bad news I am afraid is that AMD will not be financially able to keep up with core wars and eventually have to drop - also purchasing ATI has alienated potential buyers - who in right mind would purchase an AMD GPU on Intel CPU.
One thing that is interesting, is that Intel and the industry is moving in a different direction. Mobile is where the industry is going not huge fat desktops. This is a place where AMD is missing the mark and could possible complete loose it enter company open and solely based there efforts on the desktop industry.
duploxxx - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
lol dude what have you been smoking?A) its intel that responded on AMD core count
B) Zen 8 core multi die was in the design from the start to keep cost low
C) Xeon v2 and v3 both had issues with scale out on core hence the reason for the new grid which is sub optimal on caching.
D) Intel has a way more expensive die, you forget that they ask 2500+ euro upto 14000 euro for there 16+ cores? while AMD charges 4000 euro for 32 cores. The gold series dont even come close to AMD offerings in cores.
E) Intel is not moving at all, they own the biggest part of the industry on x86 and that is what they try to keep. THey lost the low power war vs ARM and they sure try to get into IOT with lots of money but it aint that easy.
F)AMD has low budget so they infiltrate markets where they believe they can gain.
cap87 - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Intel didn’t respond to AMD with higher core counts, processors are designed years in advance, suggesting otherwise is just plain ignorance. What they did do was push forward the release date of Coffee Lake thanks to AMD’s pressure.jospoortvliet - Saturday, September 30, 2017 - link
Their design was meant for servers. Bringing the 18 cores suddenly to the high end desktop was most certain my something they kept as an ace option but it wasn't their original plan and that is obvious from the way it was rushed to market, being months later than the 10 core model and many of the earlier motherboards barely or simply not able to handle the load. They are also obviously clocked very high with barely room for overclock and breaking their tdp, throttling under heavy use on many boards even without oc.Hixbot - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I'm tired of hearing this. what you are suggesting is ignorance.Intel had loads of time to R&D, yes designs take years, but they've had those years to design coffe lake with 4 cores, with 8 cores. They design and design, they could have designed a sandy bridge as 8 core and not released it. You think they need to take years to respond to a competitive push. Let me tell you, they can design all sorts of options "years in advance" and only bring to market what they choose. So if it weren't for Zen, we might be staring at a 4 core (max) coffee lake. OMG it's hilarious to see this "design takes years" argument. They can and do take years to design all sorts of potential processors, they can then choose what to bring to market in a much shorter time.
Arbie - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
For what? Some small and very expensive ST performance increase? Consider what AMD has done for us in reigniting competition and moving the tech envelope forward. Think what that took, and whether they could possibly do it again. Anyone who doesn't absolutely have to buy Intel this time around should give the nod to AMD. They've earned it, where Intel has not. Really, the tech is almost equal and in most regards AMD gives you more for the dollar. If we as consumers don't respond to that, vigorously, they may give up. How would you like an Intel-only future?Nagorak - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Plenty of other tests have shown significant scaling. This is with loose subtimings. You can get even more performance from tight subtimings on top of faster memory speed. Remember Ryzen was only about 8% slower clock for clock than Kaby Lake. Faster memory speeds make up most of that difference, albeit Ryzen can't run at such high frequency as KL.notashill - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
I'm curious if the higher clocked parts scale any better, presumably they were spending more time waiting on memory in the first place. The tests were done with a 1700, 1800X has 20% higher all-core clock.willis936 - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
It would seem that 2 channels of DDR4 is not enough to keep 8 cores fed. It will be interesting to see if it's enough to keep 6 cores fed on coffee lake since intel's memory subsystem is higher performance but they also have higher single threaded performance (and may need more memory throughput as a result).sor - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
“AGESA 1.0.0.6 BIOS updates were introduced several weeks ago”Shouldn’t that be several *months* ago, or was there some more recent AGESA release from the one being discussed in April/May?