Got my b-die today. Splurged a little on two 8gb sticks of the fancy TridentZ 3600MHz CL17 sticks. Not the biggest fan of RGB but they're b-die and they do look really nice. Maybe not the BEST b-die out there, but pretty good. I'm more excited about it than I should be. That may partially be because I just paid $220 for 16gb of ram when I already had two 4gb sticks of another make. If I didn't love it, it'd hurt me badly.
My mobo specifies slot A2 and B2 for two sticks. If you're looking straight at the board normally, going left to right, it goes A1, A2, B1, B2. Tried slot pair 1 and had trouble getting 3200 to work, though ultimately I squeezed by. Now, in pair 2 I'm running stable w/ 3466MHz/CL16 @ 1.4v DRAM and 1.1v SOC. Probably not even the best they can do, just the first config that worked
So there's something to it, yeah. I believe it, too. If things like PCB thickness can affect RAM performance, then I can see how length of the leads or general circuit path could, too.
Honestly, pretty happy with this RAM. I expected maybe 3200 without serious tweaking - I mostly wanted to upgrade to 16GB and stay with two sticks instead of adding two more 4GB sticks and slowing down my already slowish RAM. So 3466MHz ain't that bad to me! Gotta be something like a 20% raw RAM performance increase, even if overall system performance doesn't go up by nearly that much.
I'll definitely be diving into the masochistic tedium and hell of RAM sub-timing tweaking, though. Gotta get your money's worth when you shell out for binned RAM. I want that advertised bandwidth, mannn.
Limited experience with the Ryzen DRAM Calculator proved promising. Thank god for that. I had to input my own latency values, as the XMP values the app spit out didn't match my sticks, but the timings it fed me for 3600 almost got me there. It booted and ran stuff... coulda fooled me into thinking it was stable. Couldn't do that stock... ...not to mention auto timings pushed primaries up to the mid 20's
Probably a little painstaking twiddling away from actually getting there just using the calculator and my brain.
I also haven't played with D.O.C.P. yet. But at this point I really have little faith in anything hands off to give the most optimal performance at the most sensible settings. But in the case of RAM, stupidly tedious as it can be to mess with dozens of cryptic settings, I'd welcome that option if it really worked to my liking. But I really don't think it's going to get me to the level I want... ...or more just know I can get to on my own and do it better, even if it's more time for not that much gain. It at least presents a great opportunity to learn about how current stuff works. I'm tempted to pass on D.O.C.P..
Realistically, I feel like I should aspire for a max of 3400MHz with tightest possible timings. Hell, if I can drop primaries by 2 points from 3400 to 3200, I'll probably do 3200. Never really saw much suggesting where the line is with Ryzen... ...where the infinity fabric boost is overcome by slack in timings. A little here and there, but no consensus optimal range. I assume overall latency still matters, and past a certain point bandwidth just doesn't help as much as overall lower latency would. I mean, if you think of RAM bandwidth as a bottleneck for infinity fabric, then there has to be a point where you blow that open and cross over into the zone of nothing but performance expenses. I just kinda assume anything over 3000MHz is generally good. Is that fair?
What I'm most curious about is if, after I get this setup and stable, I can actually get to the full 4.3GHz with my 2600, without increasing voltage too much. I really do feel like the RAM I had in before was holding it back. Contacts were damaged, and it wasn't the best to begin with. I was pushing the limit hard - it was never meant to do that lol. And I feel like if there was a point where stability would break down, it'd be that. I've already seen how even slight RAM instability can actually increase the need for more CPU vcore to keep the whole thing going in stress tests. I've hit CPU clock speed walls by overclocking my RAM too much. I was able to hit 4.3GHz before, but only by clocking my old ram back down to stock. 2666 would work, too, but only with too much vcore to the CPU.
Can anybody chime in on their experiences with b-die and Ryzen chips? I'll be playing with it a lot soon and putting that out there, but it's always good to have others' experiences in hand going into something like this.
), or 2000 series TRs for that matter. 1950X is the closest & prices range in few thousands of sheckels & don't have tendency to drop. How do you get one for free along with 2700X & 8700K? 
jk
