By: Jonathan Kwan and Aaron Lai
October 22, 2020
Recently, one of our readers, Nate1148, wrote to us on Reddit inquiring about the performance difference between four sticks of DDR4-3600 32GB modules and two on the AMD Ryzen platform after reading my Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 2x32GB review.
There is virtually no info online on any 128GB DDR4 benchmarks with X570 boards.
There is, however, a ton of conflicting information regarding performance drops of two sticks versus four sticks because of the daisy chain memory controller.
The two stick specifications of these chips are exactly what I’m looking for: Size and speed. My question is, can you please run a quick benchmark on all four sticks together to see if there are any performance drops or if the there is a step down in bandwidth as some say would happen when you use all four slot? There is a lot of discussion over this issue.
(The comment above was edited for clarity.)
Well, we here at APH Networks are curious too. To find out more, here is our test configuration:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X @ Stock
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-U12A
Motherboard: ASUS Prime X470-Pro
Graphics: MSI GeForce GTX 1070Ti Titanium
Chassis: be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 rev. 2
Storage: Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB, OCZ ARC 100 240GB, Patriot P200 512GB
Power: Seasonic FOCUS Plus 850 Gold 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 2x32GB @ DDR4-3600 16-18-18-38
- Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 4x32GB @ DDR4-3600 16-18-18-38
Here are the results:
There you have it: In 17 out of 32 tests, having four 32GB DDR4-3600 sticks for 128GB of RAM actually outperformed having two 32GB DDR4-3600 sticks for 64GB of RAM. It is important to point out the difference in most tests was negligible at best. The largest performance gap is in the PassMark PerformanceTest 10 Memory test, where the 4x32GB setup was 18.0% faster. Two other measurable gaps can be found in PCMark 10, where the 4x32GB configuration was 8.0% faster in the Productivity test. However, in the Essentials test, the 2x32GB configuration was 8.6% faster.
To answer the question in the beginning of this article, from what I can see in our benchmark results, there is no consistent performance drop or step down in bandwidth as some say would happen when you use all four slot on the AMD Ryzen platform for 4x32GB DDR4-3600 RAM. So feel free to load it up and put as much memory in your PC as your wallet allows.
Crucial provided this product to APH Networks to facilitate this report.
