Memory Scaling on Ryzen 7 with Team Group's Night Hawk RGB
by Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on September 27, 2017 11:05 AM ESTConclusions on Ryzen DDR4 Scaling
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.
To Infinity and Beyond
Determing the sweet spot for Ryzen from our small batch of testing is not so straightforward. From our quick testing, it would seem to suggest that there are performance gains to be had, with slow progress as the data rate increases. A few benchmarks seemed to hit the performance inflextion point around the DDR4-2933/3066 boundary - or basically where the Team Group Night Hawk RGB DDR4-3000 memory kit is positioned.
Aside from the fact of having fasting memory, the speed directly adjusts the potential in AMD’s Infinity Fabric. The IF is AMD's new scalable interconnect found in the Zen CPUs, Vega GPUs, and likely the next few generations of products. Infinity Fabric connects and manages the data flow from each of the cores to each other, as well as to the additional controllers on board. But the effect of faster DRAM and faster IF, on paper, should be a mutually beneficial improvement, and one would take a reasonable guess that AMD will aim to increase both as new generations of products come to market.
Final Thoughts
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.
The Team Group Night Hawk RGB memory has served our testing needs well out of the box and it seems like a very reasonable purchase for Ryzen users looking to add a high-performance memory kit. Unfortunately there is no guarantee in the quality of the ICs on board, with Team Group stating that the type of ICs could change over the life time of the product - this will mean that the overclocking capabilities may change depending on the ICs. The memory kit we used in this testing is currently available from Newegg for $173 with a white heatspreader, or $156 with a black heatspreader. Interestingly the black version running at a faster DDR4-3200 is listed at a cheaper $164, but is currently out of stock.
| DRAM Price Comparison: 2x8GB DDR4-3000 with RGB (9/27) | ||
| Black Headspreader | White Heatspreader | |
| Team Group Night Hawk RGB |
$156 (Newegg) CL16-18-18 |
$173 (Newegg) CL16-18-18 |
| Corsair Vengeance RGB |
$160 (Amazon) CL15-17-17 |
$180 (Newegg) CL15-17-17 |
| G.Skill Trident Z RGB |
$186 (Newegg) CL15-16-16 |
|
| GeIL Super Luce RGB |
- | $160 (Newegg) CL16-18-18 |
| ADATA XPG Spectrix RGB |
$180 (Amazon) CL16-18-18 |
- |
For other RGB-based kits running 2x8 GB at DDR4-3000 with white heatsinks, Corsair's Vengeance RGB are $180 in white or $160 in black, with GeIL's Super Luce in black also at $160. By comparison, ADATA and G.Skill offer similar kits but in black, both at the $180 price point.
Testing and Analysis by Gavin Bonshor
Additional Commentary by Ian Cutress
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
65 Comments
View All Comments
willis936 - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
QDR is the same thing as DDR with a the clock running at half frequency. It's not a magical way to make your datarates higher. The same paltry MHz increase would be seen on QDR but with just tighter jitter requirements. I don't see the benefit since DDR isn't running into a power limit.NeatOman - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Now that i don't play to many games I'm ok with my 5 year old FX-8320@4.5GHz and R9 280x. Although i find that it does keep up with heavy multi-tasking, like having 20-50 tabs open while playing a FHD youtube video and working in SketchUp on a 40" 4K monitor. It also runs a file server, media server that real time transcodes 1080p in high quality, and i won't really notice while browsing and watching videos other than the lights getting brighter inside the case because the fans ramp up a bit.Zeed - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Well poor test in my eyes... Gyuess You dont know that pass 3200 its TIMINGS ALL THE WAY !!!! Join us at Overclockers.net for PROPER numbers and tests with carious timings ect.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
I hope your comment isn't an example of Overclockers.net writing quality. Proper numbers and tests aren't very useful when the supporting writing is almost incoherent.chikatana - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
I'm more interested in how will the system perform when all DIMMs are fully loaded.TAspect - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
All gaming tests are GPU bound, and that is why the CPU shows little to no scaling. The GTX 980 is clearly the bottleneck here. Either test with a GTX 1080 /Ti or lower settings until GPU is not a bottleneck.Tests only show average fps, which is a mistake as faster RAM affects minimum fps more than average. You should add 99% and 99.9% minimum fps to the graphs.
You should also include G. Skill Flare X 3200 CL14 RAM with the Stilt's 3200 fast OC profile found in the Crosshair VI Hero UEFI. On other MB's the settings are relatively simple to configure and you only have to test stability once instead of tuning all subtimings for days.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Agreed on this. Game testing at more modest resolutions and settings would remove potential GPU bottlenecks from the results. Then again, there is a little bit of support for testing at settings closer to the settings an end user would realistically used on a daily basis. It does at least demonstrate the lack of change memory timings would have in a real-world gaming scenario. It'd be optimal to do both really so readers could see results free of GPU concerns AND see how memory perfomance will impact their day-to-day gaming.lyssword - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
I think AT is one of the worst sites to get an idea of CPU gaming performance, always GPU limited or scripted part of the game with low cpu demand. Really the only time you see difference is 10% on bulldozer vs i7, where as in real world the difference is 40%. Most of the time AT test show almost no difference between core i3 and i7 because of that testing methodologyDabuXian - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Trying to find a CPU bottleneck while using an old Geforce 980? Seriously? I'd expect some basic hardware knowledge from Anandtech?r3loaded - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
I'd like to see what the effects are on Threadripper, considering that the IF spans two dies and the platform is geared towards maximising memory bandwidth.