I recently upgraded my RAM from two sticks to four (all 3600MHz), but I'm running into speed issues. My setup includes a B550 Gaming Plus motherboard, Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, AMD 6700XT GPU, and a Z440 2TB M.2 drive. Initially, I had 2x8GB of TEAMGROUP T-Force Delta RGB RAM, but I decided to add another pair for a total of 32GB. After installing the new RAM, I had to disable XMP and drop to 3200MHz. I tried changing the DRAM voltage to 1.38 and SOC to 1.1 to get back to 3600MHz, but the performance didn't improve, and the stress test results were poor. My FCLK is at 1800MHz, and here are the stress test results I got: Read: 979, Write: 711, Combined: 959. It feels sluggish, and I can't enable XMP without the system failing to boot.
4 Answers
Yeah, that’s pretty much the max limitation of Zen 3. Four sticks can indeed put a lot of pressure on the memory controller, causing potential stability issues down the line, even if you can benchmark 3600MHz. The good news is that your game performance shouldn't drop as much as you might think, and now you've got that extra memory to benefit from.
Honestly, in most cases, having two sticks is usually better than four when it comes to RAM performance!
I hear you—it can be frustrating! You might consider going with 2x16GB sticks instead. The memory controller might handle that configuration better for overclocking. If you can get it stable at around 3200MHz, that’s not too far off from 3600MHz in terms of performance.
When using four sticks of RAM, it tends to put extra stress on the memory controller, which might limit the max stable speeds you can achieve, so it's not uncommon to see slower performance. Just something to keep in mind after your upgrade.
I actually want to stick with the 32GB for smoother multitasking. I'll give the 3200MHz a try and let you know how it goes. Just an update: even with XMP enabled, it seems like the speed is still the same.