Motherboard/RAM/CPU compatibility?
LeatherGryphon
Posts: 11,651
The background: I want to improve my DAZing machine. Wheee... fun... spend money...tinker... wheee... I call him "PoppaBear" He currently has 32GB(2x16) of 3200-speed Corsair "Vengeance LPX" RAM on an Asus "Prime Z490-A" motherboard with an Intel "i7-10700" CPU. Basically I want to double his RAM size and speed it up.
Nothing wrong with him, I just want him to work faster and I also want him to have more RAM to be able to handle bigger DAZ scenes. Rule of thumb suggests that the motherboard RAM should be three times the graphic card's VideoRAM size. PoppaBear's graphic card is a an ASUS "TufGaming GeForce RTX-3060" with 12GB of VRAM. So, by the rule of thumb I should have at least 36GB of motherboard RAM. Easy, I have two empty slots so just pop in another 32GB of same memory mfg, type, speed, right? Nope, didn't work. I couldn't get all four sticks of Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200 RAM to play at the rated speed of 3200. I had to back down to 2666 or take out two of the 3200 speed sticks.
So I took out two sticks and gave them to BabyBear.
OK, so after a few months of wondering why my RAM failed to run at the rated speed of 3200, my Internet research has revealed that this is a common problem when using more than two RAM sticks. Getting multiple RAM sticks to run at their rated speed if it's above the typical base speed of 2150 is problematic. Two sticks is mostly just fine. Simply turn on the simple pre-programmed RAM overclocking feature in the BIOS and ta-da, speed. But four sticks are finicky
The sticks have to be very well matched. Better to buy them as a matched set of 4 rather than hoping to find two identical sets of 2. But sometimes even that doesn't work. RAM is a miracle of modern physics but sometimes an atom is out of place and wonks up it's extreme performance.
So, I've decided to go all out and get 64GB of better, faster RAM and get it in two sticks (2x32) instead of four (4x16). That will free up the two 16GB sticks of currently installed 3200 speed RAM for use in a lesser machine someday.
I've checked my motherboard specs and it seems to be able to handle DDR4 RAM up to 4800 speed. Although 64GB(2x32) of 3600 speed is much more affordable than even a 4000 speed set. ($300 instead of $520).
The question(s): How do CPU speed limitations play into the choice of RAM speed? Would the i7-10700 be able to handle RAM speed of 4000? How do I tell? 
Which specification? Does it matter at all, or would it just work even if the CPU couldn't drive the RAM at 4000 speed? Also, do I gain much actual performace by using 3600 speed over 3200 speed? Will the other RAM specifications like the various "latencies" eat up much of my speed advantage? I know that 3200 speed at CL latency of 16 is sort of a sweet spot between price & performance. Whereas 3600 speed generally has longer CL latency of 18. And a 4000's latency speed is even longer. Up to this time, all my RAM purchases for modern machines have been Corsair Vengeance (LPX or PRO) 3200 or 2666 speed and I'm a bit uncertain yet about the needs & performance of 3600 or 4000 speed units.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm an electrical engineer. I should know this already. But in my defence I'm ancient. I was a UNIX guru in the '80s but I've been retired for longer than some of you have been alive and I ran a research compuer facility at the Kennedy Space Center when your parents were still in grade school. I used to surf the technology wave as a pro but now I'm just floundering in the whitewater at the end of my journey. Please help a drowning old man out of the fast flowing rip current of modern technological advancement.
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Comments
I shared videos on this recently... Apparently, unless the RAM is actually the bottleneck (not likely), RAM speed makes no difference to rendering. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7401931/#Comment_7401931
I would go with 3600 speed and call it a day.
Thanks for the links.
Glad to help!
Do you overclock? If not, just get quality RAM that "matches" the rated speed of your motherboard, unless you can get a good deal on something better.
I think my answer is to just settle for 64GB (2x32) of 3200 or 3600 speed RAM. I can get either for about $300. If I get the 3200 speed then it's the same mfg & type as the RAM in all my other work related machines.
OK. Decision made. Now to figure out where to find the money and find the justification for the steal.
I hear kidneys are worth a fair price.
I got 64GB (2x32) 288-pin Oloy Owl 3600 RAM for $225+tax. They're not Corsair Vengeance, but Tom's Hardware say it'll do the job -That's assuming you don't have a NE horror story and don't mind going with a different brand. One thing that gets me is, DDR5 costs twice as much and reports in the early going say it doesn't really boost real-world system performance. It was a consideration when I picked my components.
...I'm going with 64 GB (2 x 32) of DDR4 2666 for my upgrade as it matches the ASUS Prime H570 and is within the maximum rating for the CPU. Not into 12th gen because of the odd core configuration Intel moved to.
Never heard of Oloy How good are they?
Good luck with your purchase, Torquinox.
Somewhere, a couple years ago, I saw a YouTube that said something like this: If you want to compare memories with different speed and CL latency to measure effective speed rating to give you a single number to compare by, the formula is (CL/speed)x(2000)=Rating
I don't know why this formula is suggested or if it's even accurate. And I think the multiply by 2000 is just a normalization factor to get the result into a simple positive number for easy mental comparison.
SPEED CL Rating(smaller is better)
2666 14 10.5
2666 16 12
3200 14 8.75
3200 16 10*
3600 16 8.89
3600 18 10*
Notice that 3200 speed at a CL latency of 16 is rated as 10, the same as 3600 speed at a CL of 18. Six of one, half-dozen of t'other.
When I first started buying modern RAM I looked for the 3200 CL14 type modules and they were available although were higher priced than the 3200 CL16 modules. But I haven't seen a 3200 CL14 in the last year. They're all CL16. Similar thing for the 3600's at CL16 they are rare, the more commonly found 3600's are CL18.
I've also heard in one of the YouTubes that tinkering with a 3200 CL16 can often be run at 3600 if you also increase the CL to 18.
But according to the Rating method I've shown, you don't gain anything. 
Except possibly a higher failure rate.
And I'm not yet curious enough to start manually tweaking RAM parameters except for the built-in RAM speed bump provided by the motherboard.
As others have said, they all come from the same batch with a spectrum of speed variability and are just tested to sort them into the proper bin. The rare fast ones are just priced higher.
(Note: This is also the method used from the beginning of transistor manufacture. Just make a bazillion slightly dirty rocks, mount wires on them, stuff 'em in a tiny metal can, measure how they perform and toss 'em into the corresponding bin and put the appropriate transistor ID number on 'em, and price 'em according to their rarity (i.e. their unlikely occurrence).
It's like your favorite bakery putting it's lopsided cupcakes on sale but the perfectly formed ones are handled specially and put in a decorative box to be sold individually at double the price. And the comparatively large number of run-of-the-mill cupcakes get priced in the middle somewhere, to be sold in boxes of a dozen.
...stuck with latency 18 as 16 is much more expensive. Don't even see any 2666 kits at CL 14. and only one 3200 kit at CL 14 (over400$). I could go with 3200 for CL 16 but it would still be at a higher price or with a brand I never heard of before.
Using PC Part Picker.
Thank you so much! I already bought everything. It's delivered and I'm going to build it in the next couple days. It's exciting
As I said, Tom's Hardware seems to like them well enough.
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/oloy-ram-should-you-buy
"So, should you feel comfortable buying OLOy RAM? For the most part, the answer is a resounding yes, because the company uses industry-standard ICs, which are the same as those found in many of its better-known competitors. In our tests, OLOy RAM was at least as fast as its direct competitors so performance should not be a problem."
Not worn out ones.
Complaint: I have lots of items on my wanna-improve-my-computers list.
"PoppaBear" could use more/faster RAM. "MommaBear" needs a new home(she's currently living in a discarded HP pavilion case like a hermit crab). "BabyBear" needs a proper graphics card. "George" has been retired, stripped naked & shelved but has all his hard drives & power supply in the box with him. So, he could be revived if Momma gives him back his house. GrampaBear had a brain transplant(CPU) last year but he's still a bit sluggish. I think he needs a whole head transplant (motherboard, CPU, RAM) And with a couple more big purchases I'll have enough various parts that I can start thinking of turning them into yet another computer but need a bigger power supply too. And I have to decide on and some bling like LED strips & lighted fans.
If I buy 64GB(2x32) of RAM for Poppa, then his existing 32GB(2x16) would be available for a new computer. And there's always the possibility that graphic card prices come down and one becomes irresistably affordable. All reason would go out the window.
But none of this matters because I was unable to convince myself to rob a bank. So, much of this is going to have to wait for a while.
Sounds like you have a very active computer wonderland there, @LeatherGryphon ! I feel your pain on the funding part. What do you do with all these computers?
Rebuild them for fun, lol. Keeps you on your game.
PoppaBear(real name "Saturn") is my 3D & DAZing (and other 3D softwares) machine, big graphics card, big power supply, oodles of zippy RAM, bushels of SSD & HD.
MommaBear(real name "Janus") is resting while staying in the borrowed HP case,
Titan(real name "Titan") is her replacement now occupying the big, beautiful, windowed case that he chased Momma out of. Titan is my 2D & Adobe machine. He's used for image and video editing using Photoshop, Illustrator Premier & others of various eras. He's also my primary Internet & personal machine from which I do my web browsing, email, personal documents, etc. Jobs that I used to use Momma for.
BabyBear(real name "Mimas") is a gift for my nephew. (really nice gift despite not having a graphics card, yet.)
GrampaBear(real name "Nox") An old HP that is semi-retired and just waits around for me to ask him to look in his storage for information that hasn't yet been passed down to Poppa or Momma or Titan.
Epimethius(real name "Epimethius") is yet another 10+ year old HP. He's a laptop that is dusted off only for housecalls or long distance travel.
Iapetus(real name "Iapetus") is my bedroom computer for streaming while in bed. He's a "sleeper" i.e. a modern machine housed in an old abandoned HP pavilion case.
Atlas(real name "Atlas"), like George was an old HP Pavilion but has been disassembled and stored in a box on a shelf waiting for a head & heart(power supply) transplant. Iapetus is living in Atlas's old case.
George(real name "George") is hibernating, disassembled in a cardboard box on a shelf.
All the machines named above run Windows10 well except for the shelved ones and GrampaBear(Nox). Grampa's looking forward to complete retirement or possibly a head transplant(motherboard, CPU, RAM). He already has a strong enough heart(power supply).
Promethius and Enceladus are ancient Dell Dimension machines running WinXP. On-line & accessible but mostly turned off. Turned on only for testing and playing of old games.
I acquired most of those old HP & Dell machines as cast offs from clients of my PC repair business(now defunct). I've been building up the modern machines (the bear family + titan) over the last two and a half years. The old HP & Dell machines mostly just sleep in a turned off state.
Of these 11 machines I only have four that are Windows11 capable. Although they have not yet been upgraded. They are; Saturn, Titan, Janus, & Mimas. All the others are dead-ended by hardware at Win10 or WinXP.
So, what do I plan to do with all these computers? Not much! I'm retired.
I'm just reconditioning machines because it makes me go Wheee...
I am a cereal killer of computers. I rip them into pieces and toss them into a box I hide in my closet.
So you are a computer collector, restorer, and sometimes "hot rodder". What you need is CPU-based rendering so you can devote more time and attention to your machines while rendering!!
...thanks. That will allow me to step up from 2666 CL 18 sticks to 3200 CL16 ones for almost the same cost. I do notice they get good ratings on Newegg as well.
...I have 7 machines total an old Dell Notebook in need of a replacement drive An Acer Notebook with Linux which I "inherited" from the last place I lived which was abandoned when the owners abandoned the house, Am old Toshiba Techra with a whopping 2 GB HDD that got drunk on a glass of wine one day and has never been the same. My old still functioning Toshiba Satellite that has Xp which I use for Xp stuff. A new notebook I recently purchased on eBay that has an SSD 8 GB of memory, and W7 Pro which I use for my role play game sessions (the Dell notebook used to fill that role before the drive died), "
Then there's the two desktops. Little Sister" a homebuilt system with W7 Pro and 32 GB as a secondary Daz as system well as working in Carrara (networked to my main one to share my content library) for Daz and memory for networked rendering in Carrara, Finally there is my "baby" named "Big Sister", my main rendering system, which was my first ever build, that has the Titan-X GPU and who will be getting the huge upgrade to accommodate W11 in several months" Little Sister has a GTX 750 Ti (Maxwell) for test renders.
Needless to say I don't mess around getting into the guts of the notebooks., May just get another HDD for the Dell and use it as a backup. Wanted to replace its drive with an SSD but it's older tech and only supports PATA. PATA SSDs are pretty expensive for the amount of storage you get. The Linux notebook is pretty much just for playing around with Linux in my spare time.
Once I go to W11 not I'll be able to network the two together anymore to share resoruces.
Very cool there, @LeatherGryphon ! Thanks for sharing.
It's a great hobby but expensive.
The YT big heads say I should remove the doors from my shiny new case before doing the install. They're tempered glass for the bling-happy LED crowd. I guess I'm going to do that because I don't want them to get broken, but I'd like it better if the YT folks were around to help me put the doors back on!
Sounds like you also have a busy computer wonderland.
Mine is not so busy, but maybe it will be some day? Or maybe it's busier than I realized.
Dang, I have just the drive you need but I drilled holes in it.
Sorry I did that.
Is it worth investigating whether you can use a PATA to SATA connector adapter?
Although, I had that same idea to try to use a SATA DVD in a system with an old motherboard without SATA. I was sure it would work and let me boot the Win10 installation DVD via the PATA adapter to the DVD drive. It not only didn't work, it actually froze my machine during POST.
I don't know why.
After several tries I gave up and bought a SATA DVD drive and did my booting via a USB thumbdrive. Although, it should be noted that I have used a PATA to SATA converer for hard drives previously, and they worked fine in other machines. But this one didn't.
Your mileage may vary.
Oh, and why this: "Once I go to W11 not I'll be able to network the two together anymore to share resoruces."
...mostly it's only the two desktops, and the one notebook I use for gaming sessions.
May have to deal with the Techra as even though I put it "on the wagon" years ago. It must be sneaking out to the wine bar down the street when I'm not at home as it's still somewhat loopy.
...considered that but the drive bay is a very tight fit just for a 2.5" drive by itself as there's also a mounting bracket involved. The adaptors tend to add about a quarter inch to the drive's length.
I'm not the best at networking from the software angle. As I understand networking between different OS verions tends to be a little more problematic.
I see
I have my new build that will become the main machine, my current computer - A Dell8900 with i7-6700 and Nvidia 745, an old 17" i5 laptop that I was using for client presentations, and my ancient Phenom x4-based xp box that I use to play Starcraft and other older games. These days, the only thing special about that is the beastly GM Sniper case that I got on sale for that build. That's a tank of a case with an enormous side fan!