DDR4 -3200 or 3600 16 or 32 gig

[MrNeil]

I recently purchased a i7 10700KF and a Gigabyte Z490 VISION G. At the moment i have 16gig DDR4-3200 G.Skill TridentZ and would like to know if adding another 16gig of the same ram would be better than adding 16gig of DDR-3600 which will have better timing and frequency ? As I understand if I also went for 32gig of the 3600 it be a slightly lower timing but basically perform the same as 16gig with a better frequency.

cheers mateys!

[MrJim]

The amount of RAM you might need really depends on what you're using your PC for, and how you use it (e.g. running lots of programs concurrently). TridentZ generally overclocks quite well, so I wouldn't be surprised if you could run it at 3600 speed, with a bit of tinkering. 'Buildzoid' on Youtube has quite a few videos on ram overclocking. I couldn't tell you how much of an impact faster ram would have on your Intel cpu...with Ryzen, there is a definite improvement in cpu performance with ram up to 3600 speed, especially with tighter timings (due to how ram speeds interact with infinity fabric).

[AGTDenton]

I recently purchased a i7 10700KF and a Gigabyte Z490 VISION G. At the moment i have 16gig DDR4-3200 G.Skill TridentZ and would like to know if adding another 16gig of the same ram would be better than adding 16gig of DDR-3600 which will have better timing and frequency ? As I understand if I also went for 32gig of the 3600 it be a slightly lower timing but basically perform the same as 16gig with a better frequency.

cheers mateys!

Chances of you noticing the better timings are slim I would say.
Personally would go to 32GB if you're running games etc.. that are using it.
A number of AAA titles are feeling limiting on 16GB these days.

Also your CPU is only rated for DDR4-2933 so fairly pointless unless you're overclocking it.

[kalniel]

As above, depends on usage. It's generally not worth spending any money on faster ram above 3200 - while there are gains, they're small and you can usually get better bang for buck elsewhere on the system.

Since you already have some RAM why not use it for a while and see if you need more - if so, I'd probably recommend more of the same, just for ease of compatibility. Note that going to 4 banks also puts a bit more pressure on the mem controller so overclocking is slightly less successful.

Also your CPU is only rated for DDR4-2933 so fairly pointless unless you're overclocking it.

That's fine - you can run RAM overclocked without touching the rest of the CPU. They practically encourage it with XMP for eg.

[MrNeil]

Also your CPU is only rated for DDR4-2933 so fairly pointless unless you're overclocking it.[/QUOTE]

XMP has set it to 3200 already for me which I would have expected it to do 2933! Strange board I have as it seems to know what to do! It also set my cpu at 4900GHz without me doing anything.

[MrJim]

XMP has set it to 3200 already for me which I would have expected it to do 2933! Strange board I have as it seems to know what to do! It also set my cpu at 4900GHz without me doing anything.

A lot of motherboards are configured by default to run outside Intel's TDP, so giving the cpu more power and therefore allowing the cpu to turbo up to a higher frequency. There's also 'muti-core enhancement' (or whatever Gigabyte call it) that allows all cores to turbo up as high as they can go.

[MrNeil]

You can choose to ramp up all the core that go to 5.2 but thats when the fans run a bit crazy so the 4.9 is the non aggressive sweet spot