Any way to monitor current memory ACCESS usage?

Lamberto Vitali said:

Yet the table you posted shows GSkill is no good for my board, I can't use 4 sticks.

I just buy the cheapest with good specs and hope for the best (which usually ends up as Kingston). It helps having 8 computers so I can swap things about to make them all happy.

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Yeah, hence the reason that i just stick to 2 sticks of RAM max and forget that 4 sticks is even an option.

I start with 2 for a different reason, so I can upgrade later without removing smaller sticks. In fact I often start with 1.

But I need more than 2 sticks quite often as I run huge programs.

Whatever happened to triple channel? I've got that on a couple of old dual CPU Xeons. I had it on an "Intel Extreme" something desktop once too. Those Xeons go phenominally fast on a weather predicting program I'm running. Twice as fast as my Ryzen under discussion here, even though they should be 3 times slower according to the CPU specs.

There really is something terribly wrong here. The memory is made to certain specifications, the memory should function correctly at a certain speed with a certain range of voltage etc. The motherboard should provide the correct voltage within that range. If memory doesn't work with 4 sticks in the MB, either the RAM or the MB is not working to spec and is therefore made incorrectly. Companies nowadays never get held liable for making shoddy products.

Lamberto Vitali said:

There really is something terribly wrong here. The memory is made to certain specifications, the memory should function correctly at a certain speed with a certain range of voltage etc. The motherboard should provide the correct voltage within that range. If memory doesn't work with 4 sticks in the MB, either the RAM or the MB is not working to spec and is therefore made incorrectly. Companies nowadays never get held liable for making shoddy products.

Click to expand...

Well, these memory speeds are advertised as their potential overclocked speeds. With any type of overclock, a lot goes into it, and there are never guarantees. So much comes down to the silicon lottery.

Even with high end enterprise class server equipment, depending upon how many RAM slots you fill, determines the max speed that you are going to be able to run the RAM at. You will find buried in the documentation that if you populate say 6 of the DIMM slots you get 2400, but if you populate any additional slots it drops to 1600, and if you fill the last 4 slots, you drop to 1333.

It's been this way in the consumer area for quite some time with RAM. most times, we get lucky and it just works. We also are told to try to get matching sticks, same make and model works best.

Whether you actually see a performance hit day to day is the real question. On paper, the drop from 3200mhz to 2133 is huge. that's 33%. However, I have a PCI Gen 4 NVMe drive that can hit 7000MB/sec. I also have a SATA SSD that hits 530MB/sec. That makes my NVMe drive 13.2x faster. But when I compare loading and playing games on my system, the difference is like 13 seconds, versus 11.8. It's completely negligible. On paper, it would be night and day. In the real world, you have to prove it via a stopwatch

In your case you have a stated need for more RAM. You could remove your third stick and time your system performance to see if running at 3200 really makes any difference at all. Then you would know for sure if it's really hampering you at all. You may find that it doesn't amount to anything. If that's the case, put in the extra RAM, call it a day and don't worry about it. When you buy your next system, research more on your exact mobo and the RAM you want to run to ensure that others have success.

I run many CPU intensive programs, only 1 of about 15 is running about 3 times slower. Lack of dual channel and 2000 instead of 3000 adds up to exactly 3. The other 14 run at the same speed. The first one deals with massive data sets and presumably is constantly accessing RAM. But I can run more than one at a time, so the CPU can be thinking with one while the other one is fetching. But far more of them need >64GB.

So the MB manufacturers are scrimping on things we may never use to achieve the specs they want to sell them at, I guess there are limits to what you can fit on a board. I'm surprised on a graphics card for example they can send 150 amps from the VRM to the GPU along the tracks!