AMD Ryzen 7 1700 + B350 DDR4 Memory Speed Tests

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 + B350 DDR4 Memory Speed Tests

Earlier this week I posted some Ryzen 7 1800X DDR4 memory scaling Linux tests now that MSI pushed out an updated BIOS for that X370 motherboard that allows running the system at higher -- but still rather limited -- DDR4 memory frequencies. Here are some similar tests with my Ryzen 7 1700 and a B350 motherboard...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-7-1700-B350-v1.2-DDR4

[tildearrow]

Typo?

So for these Friday benchmarks are just some Ryzen 7 1700 tests on Ubuntu Linux when running at DDDr4-2133. DDR4-2400, and DDR4-2667.

[Panek]

You may/should see some better RAM overclocking results in May, as AMD has announced an AGESA update targeting exactly that for that timeframe (You have to scroll down a little): https://community.amd.com/community/...unity-update-2

Though I do find it interesting that they have reportedly been able to lower RAM latencies by about 6ns with the AGESA 1.0.0.4 update "soon" to be rolled out to motherboard manufacturers - among some other bugfixes and enhancements. I do wonder if this will translate into measurable results in some applications once BIOS updates containing the new code will be distributed.

[schmidtbag]

These results are very interesting when compared to the ones from earlier this week. Most of the tests have pretty drastic changes in behavior and are overall pretty mixed. Some tests seem to scale better with memory, some seem to have lost scaling. Some of the new tests were faster at 2133MHz vs the old 2667MHz results. Some tests were slightly slower at every speed.

I'd say overall it was an improvement, though clearly there is more work to be done.

[RavFX]

Gigabyte did not even release a working bios with the 21 March update yet...
I wonder if I can extract the AGESA from another bios and put it in the AB350 Gaming 3...
Time to play in the meat!

https://ami.com/en/products/bios-uefi-tools-and-utilities/bios-uefi-utilities/

[dungeon]

The AMD Ryzen 7 1700 is currently paired with a MSI B350 TOMAHAWK motherboard. MSI recently released a v1.2 BIOS update that improves memory compatibility and system stability. With that board update, the 2 x 8GB DDR4-3000 Corsair memory modules can now run higher than DDR4-2133, but they don't yet work in their AMP mode to push the modules to 3000MHz -- the system is unbootable until clearing the CMOS. Even when trying for DDR4-2933, which was successful with the Ryzen 7 1800X + MSI X370 board, wasn't possible with this current BIOS. The highest I could boot with this Ryzen 7 1700 configuration on this latest BIOS was DDR4-2667.

Digged a bit on MSI site, but seems i don't see Corsair DDR4-3000 8GB there:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/supp...ml#support-mem

there is only one 3K listed but of 4x4GB kit. What model number is that? Or maybe it is a typo there

[Veerappan]

Glad to see that your B350 Tomahawk didn't die after all.

[RavFX]

-rw-r--r-- 1 xx xx 2592 Mar 31 14:55 cpu00660F00_ver06006012_date14-10-2014.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 xx xx 2592 Mar 31 14:55 cpu00660F01_ver06006118_date18-02-2016.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 xx xx 3328 Mar 31 14:55 cpu00800F00_ver0800002A_date06-10-2016.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 xx xx 3328 Mar 31 14:55 cpu00800F10_ver08001009_date30-11-2016.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 xx xx 3328 Mar 31 14:55 cpu00800F11_ver08001105_date04-01-2017.bin

Time to find a Motherboard BIOS that have up to date AGESA/Microcode

[mmstick]

What are the timings that the motherboard is setting though? After all, the frequency is only half the story. It wouldn't matter if it's running at 3000 MHz if the latency was increased to accommodate that, thus making 3000 as slow as 2133 or slower.

That said, it seems to me that the bigger issue here, for games, is likely the graphics drivers not being optimized for the new architecture.

[RavFX]

What are the timings that the motherboard is setting though? After all, the frequency is only half the story. It wouldn't matter if it's running at 3000 MHz if the latency was increased to accommodate that, thus making 3000 as slow as 2133 or slower.

That said, it seems to me that the bigger issue here, for games, is likely the graphics drivers not being optimized for the new architecture.

To have worse performance at 2133 than 3000 you need to do a really big jump in the timing, specially on Ryzen as the RAM access is already kinda slow because the way the CPU request the cache. Once the L2 fail, Ryzen ask the L3 in the same context CCX and again, if it fail, it ask the L3 of the other CCXs and the memory controller in the same time, and you have an extra 30ns of delay right there (more information here: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/956-...e-memoire.html )... Plus, at lease on my board, it chosen CL15-15-15-28 at 2133 default and so CL16-18-18-38 at 3200 offer a real gain... Of course you could have manually put 12-13-13-13-26, at 2133 and on some specific case, it would be faster than 3000 but most people will just leave it as is with the default and have crappy timing as the XMS profile do not work.

Going from CL11-11-11-11 to CL15-15-15-15 add about 4ns, if your process his jumping around in different core, it add more extras cache miss and so more extra 30ns so in my opinion it's better to be sure that memory or cache intensive process stay pinned on the same CPU core (like taskset) than having CL13@2133 instead of CL16@3200, gaining 3ns have less value than the 33% more bandwidth in most case especially if you take into account how bad the access time actually is on Ryzen, like a request to all missed cache to ram will take 92ns with CL13 or 95ns with CL16.