Hey guys, I'm finally thinking I'm gonna pull the trigger on an upgrade to my system, and I've decided on the MSI Z690 PRO A board with an i7 12700k.
I'm not sure what I should be getting for ram on this, was wondering if some people could throw some good suggestions.
I mostly game/video edit and record music..
RGB is not important.
Posted Feb 4, 2022, 2:01 AM UTC
I would personally vote the highest possible DDR4 speed you can get.
I'm not too familiar with DDR4 packages.. I see there are CL16, CL18, different mhz, different timings. Any of this relevant?
What is the rest of your system like? A parts list?
well i'm re-using my old case. I'm gonna go AIO 360 mm.. running 1080TI for a little while longer...
Uhhh...
Do you mean the PRO Z690-A DDR4? Because the PRO Z690-A takes DDR5.
I think it would be pretty obvious OP is referring to the DDR4 variant, given that they're asking for DDR4 recommendations.
No budget specified, but I vote this.
https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/product/dqbTwP/gskill-ripjaws-v-32-gb-2-x-16-gb-ddr4-4000-cl18-memory-f4-4000c18d-32gvk
nice choice. something I was eyeing.. CL18 / CL16, how important is all that in my choice?
Lower CL is better, but often times the price you pay for a lower CL with respect to your speed isn't worth the money you would pay to get it. CL18 on a 4000MHz kit will give you a good latency sweet spot, faster than people running 3200C16, but marginally slower than 3600C16. The extra speed will help with making up that difference (depending on the application).
You'll be fine with 4000C18 in my opinion. I wouldn't go above 4000MHz unless you like to play with the BIOS because higher speeds may require your CPU to run in Gear 2, which basically is the CPU's memory controller running at half the speed of your RAM, which will hurt performance. Above 4000 you can probably tweak it and get away with running Gear 1, but that will require effort and probably many headaches to get rock solid stability. This should be a sweet spot in terms of cost and set-and-forget performance.
Is gear 1/2 for Alder Lake?
Yup, it's in there.
EXCELLENT reply. thank you.. this stuff confuses me a bit since I didn't consider many things the last time I purchased ram for my 4790k.
I do plan on overclocking everything, so the idea here is to get the best bang for the buck essentially.