AMD Ryzen DDR4 Memory Scaling Tests On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Memory on 29 March 2017 at 04:49 PM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 68 Comments.

This week MSI finally released an updated BIOS for the X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM that we've been using for a majority of our Ryzen Linux benchmarks. With that motherboard improving memory compatibility and allowing us to finally run the board at higher DDR4 memory clock frequencies, I've run some fresh AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Ubuntu Linux benchmarks at various memory frequencies.

MSI released their v1.3 BIOS for this motherboard to succeed the original v1.1 release. I've been checking it daily for BIOS updates and was delighted to see this morning that this new version is available. The listed changes for this Ryzen board update are improved memory compatibility and improved system stability.

Using 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 Corsair memory, first I tried to put the DIMMs in their "AMP" mode to push it to the rated 3200MHz frequency. Unfortunately, like the earlier BIOS release, the system was not bootable. The BIOS POST code displayed on board was just F9 when attempting the AMP mode or manually pushing the memory frequency to DDR4-3200, regardless of additional voltage being fed to them. But, compared to before, I could now push the DIMMs up to DDR4-2933MHz where as before the system wasn't booting above DDR4-2133 for this particular board and memory combination.

AMD Ryzen Memory Scaling

The available memory frequencies I was able to test with the Ryzen 7 1800X On Ubuntu 16.10 were DDR4-2133, DDR4-2400, DDR4-2677, and DDR4-2933. On the following pages are these results for those interested in the memory speed impact of the Ryzen 7 on different Linux games and workloads. All benchmarks were done via the Phoronix Test Suite. Still waiting on a BIOS update for my Ryzen 7 1700 system to see how it changes.


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