[GTALUG] war story #2: buying RAM

[Nicholas Krause]

On 5/14/23 22:46, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Sun, May 14, 2023 at 03:41:47PM -0400, Nicholas Krause via talk wrote:
>> XMP or a version  is on AMD. The problem your running into is CPUs these days default to a certain Ram Speed. I'm not sure of what gen your on for the Thinkpad but googling default memory speed of gen X, where X is your gen should resolve that issue. If you need to go helper than you need XMP or the AMD version to go beyond the default speed. For sure,3200 is beyond that for memory with current gen.
> 
> Lenovo ships the machine with DDR4 3200 ram, and AMD lists that CPU as
> running DDR4 at up to 3200.
> 
> The CPU/system supports 3200, but it only uses the JEDEC default profile,
> not XMP.
> 

Yes, Hugh will run into problems then of getting that speed. The JEDEC default profile is 2400mhz
from memory. Not sure how locked the Bios on his Thinkpad is. It seems that lots of people are
reporting XMP enabling not being possible. I don't know why they would lock that considering
RAM Speeds needing XMP for the full speed, for the last decade or so.

Not to mention AMD chips like faster RAM up to 3200mhz from memory. There are suppose to be
performance differences there as well. This seems like a very bad manufacturer decision if
this is occurring with Lenovo Laptops.

Hugh, are you just using the ram for web browsing or multitasking? If that's the case I don't
think the 800mhz bulk is going to be a big deal. It's up to you but Ryzen only wants faster
ram when I checked for applications like databases, GPU programming e.t.c. So if your fine
with the lower speed and I'm assuming that's the use case it should be alright.

Cheers,

Nick