 What RAM you choose can have a profound effect on the performance of your new gaming PC. But because memory isn't as sexy as CPUs or graphics cards, it often gets overlooked. Well, not today. Behind me, courtesy of G.Skill, is 11 kits of dual channel DDR4 memory, and with it, we intend to arm you guys with all the information that you need to choose the best option for your new 3rd gen AMD Ryzen system. What's going in and out of your PC when you're connected to the internet? Well, with GlassWire, you can find out and see if there are any suspicious or badly behaving apps. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off at the link in the video description. INTRO MUSIC AMD's new Zen 2 cores have twice as much onboard high speed cache, which keeps them fed with data much more efficiently than before, which is great. But the thing is, all of that cache still has to pull data from somewhere, which means that we still need fast system memory. Now, 3rd gen Ryzen increases the stock supported memory speed all the way up to a whopping 3200 MHz. That means that not only can you count on that speed being a good fit for the platform, you can also count on being able to achieve much higher speeds than you previously could. And that's even without the best RAM chips that money can buy, and a degree in overclocking from the University of, Oh my god, I'm so bored. When will this end? So, that sounds great. Just buy the fastest, cheapest RAM you can find and run that, is what I might say, if it weren't for the close relationship between memory bandwidth and the high speed interconnect between Ryzen CPU cores called the Infinity Fabric. Now this generation, AMD has opened up some new and interesting options by allowing users to decouple the Infinity Fabric clock from the memory clock. So from stock speed, around 3200, up until around DDR4-3600, which most people should be able to hit, you'll be at what AMD refers to as 1 to 1. That is to say, both the memory and the Infinity Fabric share the same input clock and run in sync, just like last gen. But, it's also possible to crank your RAM speeds much higher than you otherwise could by abandoning that 1 to 1 ratio. So, that needs to be investigated, because higher memory speeds should yield an increase in raw throughput. But, they could also cost you dearly because of the extra latency that is introduced due to the unsynchronized clocks. Making matters even more complicated, you can also go the other way and crank your Infinity Fabric clock even if you have slower memory modules that can't keep up. Then, you can try to make up some of that latency penalty by tightening up your RAM timings. So, we began our journey by making some educated guesses. First, because the Infinity Fabric is known to reliably hit 1800 MHz, investing in a DDR4-3600 kit and running that at 1 to 1 should be a pretty safe bet, and then the lower the rated latencies, the better the overall performance, in theory. Second, there's probably a higher tier of performance to be had by decoupling the Infinity Fabric and the memory speeds, if you're willing to put in the work. Because otherwise, why in the devil would AMD have put the engineering resources into making that an option? Many questions still remain though. So, to answer them, we gathered our giant pile of G.Skill Trident Z memory, high speed low latency kits, high latency low speed kits, and then everything in between, and locked Anthony in a room until he was finished testing them. Let's start on the lower half of the performance spectrum. Here, we see that memory speeds lower than 3200 MHz are, in fact, pretty harmful to Ryzen 3rd Gen's overall performance. That is, unless we run slow but very low latency memory and then crank our Infinity Fabric as high as we possibly can, which on our chip was about 1900 MHz. That actually yielded performance similar to our low latency 3200 MHz kit, but at two-thirds the memory clock speed. So then, if you can't afford or find a high frequency RAM kit, cranking your Infinity Fabric could help make up a lot of the difference, especially if you get a golden chip. Then, when we switch to the higher performance kits, things get even more interesting. Now, at first, as you might expect, going from 3200 to 3600 and then 3733 MHz makes for some pretty healthy boosts in performance, particularly on those low latency kits. But, look what happens when we go to 3800 MHz and beyond. As a result of the higher latencies involved with memory this fast and the desynchronized Infinity Fabric, we actually end up losing some performance. Putting our Infinity Fabric back to 1900 MHz, which is the highest that ours will go without crashing, we do pick back up a little bit, particularly with our 3800 MHz kit, since that can run at that nice sweet 1 to 1 ratio. Now, as of writing, DDR4-3600 can be found for around the same price as 3200, depending on where you live and where you look. So, we also tried running both of those memory frequencies at the maximum Infinity Fabric clock that we could muster, and it turns out that depending on the application, this can provide a boost or a slight hindrance to your overall performance. Finally, because Anthony couldn't leave well enough alone, we ran the fastest 1 to 1 ratio kit that we could and tightened up the timings to test memory overclocking potential. And holy schmoly! With averages anywhere from 2 to 8% higher than our previous best and percentiles jumping up by up to 27%, we've not only validated our low latency results for the 2133 MHz kit, but we can also confidently say that aggressively tightening timings on any memory kit on Ryzen can dramatically improve your gaming experience, if not your Cinebench score, which didn't really seem to care about any of this. Unfortunately, this is where our journey into high-speed memory on Ryzen 3rd Gen ends, at least in these early days. We did manage to reach 4000 MHz RAM stable by the way, guys, but we had to dig deeper into system voltage adjustments that were not that comfortable recommending to the average user, and then we weren't able to get anything beyond that to post, at least with our CPU. The good news is that we've already got enough results to boil down our recommendations to a few key points. Number one, don't stress the super high memory speeds and instead target memory that your system can support. If all you want is something that's fast, but that you know will work, grab a 3600 MHz kit with low latencies. Number two, if you're adventurous, go for it. Get a higher-end kit and see how far you can push your Infinity fabric. The worst case scenario is you can clock the memory down and use DRAM calculator for Ryzen to help you convert that extra speed headroom into tighter timings. It's not going to result in worse performance under any circumstances. Number three, if your region's market is bad for memory pricing or availability, you really shouldn't stress too much. Find a low latency 2133 memory kit and focus on overclocking your Infinity fabric. You'll still be getting darn near the full experience. It really is a testament to how good of a job AMD has done in engineering their Zen 2 cores that even though of course memory does still affect performance, it's not quite as necessary to get a great experience as it might have once been. Ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction. And with Ting, you pay only for what you use with the average Ting bill coming in at just $23 a month per device. They have no contracts and you can try it risk-free. And if you're stuck in a contract with your existing carrier and you switch to Ting, they'll cover 25% of your cancellation fee up to $75. They've got nationwide coverage from coast to coast in the USA and data is now just $10 a gig beyond the second gig. They never block, throttle or interfere with your online access. And you can find out how much you'll save on Ting by going to linus.ting.com and trying out their savings calculator. We used their voicemail to text service and published our number 1-833-565-LTT-VM to hear some messages from our fans. I unfortunately don't have access to Ting here in the UK, but I would love to get it. It would save me roughly around about 10 pounds if you were to convert it. So I really hope to be able to come over here into the UK. So lower your phone bill at linus.ting.com and get $25 in Ting credit. We'll have that linked below. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like and subscribe to maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join.