ANTONY LEATHER’S
Customised PC
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MODDING / OPINION
T
hermaltake’s ToughRAM
RGB memory kit picked up an
Approved award a few issues
ago, thanks to a low price, great RGB
lighting, 3600MHz frequency and
reasonable overclocking. So when
Thermaltake offered us the chance to
take a peek at the 4400MHz version of
the kit, we agreed, if only to see how
our current test systems handle such
rapid memory.
Of course, the trick with memory
kits at these speeds is tweaking AMD
motherboards, so the Infinity Fabric
doesn’t go haywire. Our Intel system
hit the rated 4400MHz speed straight
away, just using the XMP profile and
a lofty DDR voltage of 1.45V. With our
AMD X570 system, though, doing that
saw our test rig hit stability issues at the
Windows desktop, so we delved back
into the EFI to locate the problem.
With 3rd-gen Ryzen CPUs’ improved
memory controller, you can hit a 1:1 ratio
between the memory clock and Infinity
Fabric clock all the way up to 3600MHz
Testing Thermaltake’s
4400MHz ToughRAM RGB
Thermaltake’s
ToughRAM looks
amazing, but are
there any benefits
to running it at
4400MHz?(effective). However, both the memory
and Infinity Fabric are really operating at
1800MHz here, as DDR memory sends
two signals per clock cycle.
Beyond 3600MHz, you’ll need to
fiddle with dividers in the EFI to allow
the Infinity Fabric to drop back to stable
frequencies, but allow the memory
to continue north. Our MSI MEG X570
Unify motherboard only managed to
hit 1700MHz on Infinity Fabric with the
memory running at 4400MHz – setting
the Infinity Fabric any higher resulted
in stability issues in Windows. With the
Infinity Fabric running at 1700MHz, oursystem achieved a multi-threaded
score of 5,734 and single-threaded
score of 539 in CPU-Z.
Using a 3466MHz memory kit with
tighter timings, however, we were
able to push Infinity Fabric much
higher, to either 1733MHz in a 1:1 ratio
or all the way up to 1800MHz. Both
these settings offered slightly better
performance than the faster memory,
with a multi-threaded score of 5,800
and a single-threaded score of 543.
It’s clear, then, that ultra-fast
memory remains the domain of
extreme overclocking. It’s especially
not really worth using memory faster
than 3600MHz on AMD systems, since
1800MHz is usually the highest Infinity
Fabric frequency that can be achieved
on many X570 motherboards anyway,
and running Infinity Fabric out of sync
with a faster kit can lead to slower
performance. There are diminishing
returns once you get above 3600MHz,
so think very carefully before investing
in a super-speedy memory kit.