How to find fastest 64GB RAM for my laptop

Hi Everyone,

I'm considering upgrading from 32GB to 64GB on my new MSI GE76 11UH-245 due to some background financial apps I am running that use 20+ GB by themselves, plus several browser windows, etc finds me at about 80% memory saturation with my current 32GB. How do I go about finding the fastest possible RAM? The only kit I can find that looks like it will be the fastest is this Crucial Ballistix https://www.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/bl2k32g32c16s4b/CT19943605
I'm assuming that 3200Mhz is the fastest the the Tiger Lake-H processors support, which is what my current RAM is running at, but I certainly would enjoy doubling the amount and reducing the CL from its current 22 to the 16 offered with this RAM. Any suggestions are appreciated!

 

Well one suggestion is to buy it and let is know if it runs full speed lol! Mine came with64GB of crappy CL22, wish I would have went with less initially now.

 

You can buy it too and sell your slow RAM if it works.

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#U=4&Z=65536002&sort=price&page=1&S=3200,3200

I would narrow it down more to the proper pins but, off the top of y head I can't recall the correct number.

 

Thank you. It's 260 pins so after applying that filter with 64GB there is nothing unfortunately. I've searched all over on all the major manufacturers websites and the Crucial Ballistix is the top dog. I'm gonna go ahead and get it and I'll let you guys know. I'm also going to prob grab whatever the fastest NVME is. I thought it was the Samsung 980 Pro but more recent articles are putting the Western Digital Black SN850 at the top so I'm not sure yet which one to get.

https://www.newegg.com/ballistix-64...e=sdram-_-20-164-170-_-Product&quicklink=true

https://www.pcgamer.com/best-pcie-4-ssd-for-gaming/

 

The WD Black SN850 is the one to buy for performance.

 

Ok that's what I figured. I just got the WD SN850 and the 64GB of Crucial Ballistix CL16 so I'll let you guys know how it all goes. I wanted the SN850 with the built in heatspreader but it won't fit. I do have one of those little heatspreader kits though so maybe that will help. This NVME is notorious for running a bit warm so I guess we shall see.

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https://pcpartpicker.com/product/kYLwrH/crucial-64-gb-2-x-32-gb-ddr4-2666-memory-ct2k32g4sfd8266 I adjusted the filters around based on the 260 pins and it looks like the only option is Crucial which isn't bad but a bit pricey.

Drives... I went with 2 different options. both are Phison based controllers and originally went with BPX Pro 1TB and added a CS3030 1TB and with testing found the CS3030 to be faster more consistently @ 1.5GB/s @ ~$130 it's a good deal compare to the likes of Samsung and has a high TBW warranty. 1TB+ drives tend to have better durability / warranty typically 3-5 years coverage compared to 1 year on lower tier drives.

1-1.5GB/s should be sufficient in most cases unless you're running a high IOPS application like a DB for multiple users from your machine. The biggest gains from having higher throughput are drive cloning and beyond that it's not really used daily at that high speed. It depends on what you're doing though.

 

Yeah I saw the Crucial memory on their site but it's slower with worse timings than the Ballistix. As for nvme, your correct that I may not see much real world difference except under sustained load. I do however run VMWARE as well as RAM intensive financial forecasting apps and large video files for editing so it will be interesting to see if I can notice any real world improvements after these two upgrades.

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When it comes to NVME's there's a new trend to keep an eye on....

https://www.techspot.com/news/90928-western-digital-caught-swapping-lower-grade-nand-budget.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3599339/why-you-may-not-be-getting-the-ssd-you-paid-for.html
https://www.extremetech.com/computi...2-ssds-tlc-nand-for-slower-inferior-qlc-chips
https://www.lowyat.net/2021/250664/...ut-nand-controller-chipset-on-sn550-blue-ssd/

Just about every MFG is swapping for lower tier controllers / NAND for some reason. About the only one not confirmed to be swapping right now is Intel.

VM's / RAM intensive aren't quite the same though more RAM on a VM does make a difference. The CPU though having enough cores to run them is a bigger issue with laptops being limited to 6-8 cores at this point max. Also the GPU needs to have enough ram on it for the VM to run smoothly visually. The disk speed of any SSD / NVME exceeds the needs for anything other than bulk sustained copies.

RAM "speed" in most cases you won't see a difference in performance at this point like you would have back in the 90's when stuff was SLOW. Today though it's all virtually the same unless you're running a Quantum computer. Even the advances in the GPU DDR exceeds what can potentially be used in terms of speed due to other limitations. Mostly marketing at this point for a premium feel good price.

If you're running something from a LiveCD though where the OS is loaded into RAM w/o installing on a native storage then you might see some differences but, not likely unless you're using some intensive / taxing programs. If you could load a complete VM into RAM then yes you'd be able to see the difference but, the main function of RAM is to reduce the writes to the disk to reduce wear over time. Of course it's faster than nay SSD / NVME in most cases but, it's limited in scope for what it can be used for.

If you had a desktop and a CPU with 40+ threads available w/ dual CPU's and ability to add 128GB of RAM for a hypervisor setup w/ NVME caching then it might make sense.

Basically it all comes down to how much you want to spend for the performance of certain situations. Adding $500 of RAM / NVME w/o additional considerations won't get you massive gains. If you were to setup a NVME array using something like HighPoint's cards

https://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/nvme-storage-solution.htm

https://nvmexpress.org/nvme-raid-making-storage-faster-than-ever/
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16247/highpoint-updates-nvme-raid-cards-for-pcie-40-up-to-8-m2-ssds

For a laptop though the most I've seen is 2 x NVME slots available which means in a Raid -0 you could potentially double the throughput until you hit thermal throttling which is inevitable due to the lack of drive cooling from the system due to the confined space. To get some serious HP from those 8 x NVME cards you need some serious cooling in place but, could blow the doors off throughput up to the limit of the CPU / MOBO lanes available with PCI4/5 implementations. It's really easy to spend $10K on one of those setups just in storage components to get the most out of them.

 

It's funny you mentioned the controller swapping, I had just read an article about that being done on the 970 Evo Plus. I don't think I've seen it on any PCIe Gen 4 drives but certainly something to look out for. As for the rest, I agree that these upgrades are negligible. I can't divulge all of the reasons I've chosen to buy everything I can top of the line for this system, but it certainly factors more into my decision than my expectations of revolutionary differences between the components that came with it and the ones I have replaced. The fact that it comes with the 3080 16GB with 165W TGP, PCIe 4.0, Thunderbolt 4, USB 3.2 Gen2, WiFi 6E, etc is already plenty fast, especially coming from a 6 year old Skylake system. I can only imagine what performance improvements will exist 6 years from now when I replace this. Another point to me made is that real performance breakthroughs require a desktop setup anyhow. Not saying my laptop is not more than enough, but if someone is looking for bleeding edge then desktop is where they will need to be.

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You can go bleeding edge on a laptop as well if you're willing to give blood for it. Attachments make anything possible but, then your portability suffers carrying everything around. There's always a trade off somewhere.

 

Here's some information that would help on Balistix Cl16 3200MhZ RAM:
https://www.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/bl2k32g32c16s4b

Response from the merchant:

"A pair of DDR4-3200 Ballistix RAM could run at DDR4-2666 speeds if XMP was not running as an example, or it could run at 3200 speeds, but with a slower latency. This is all okay, since most of our memory is designed to run at multiple speed settings. We're sorry to see that you have already returned the RAM. If in future if you change your mind, we would be glad to assist you with the memory troubleshooting. We would request you to contact us directly using the information that we have provided below so that we can assist you further. We hope that the above information has answered your question. If you have further questions, we welcome your reply. You can also visit our Contact page for other ways to reach us. Regards, The Crucial Team The memory and storage experts. ™ Micron Consumer Products Group Contact us: https://www.crucial.com/support/contact Micron Consumer Products Group, a division of Micron Europe Ltd Registered in England, Company No. 02341071 Registered Office: Greenwood House, London Road, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 2AA UNITED KINGDOM"

The RAM in question would only work at CL16 and 3200 MhZ if you can overclock the sticks via XMP profiles in the BIOS.
If you don't have XMP profiles option enabled in the BIOS itself (and most laptops don't because the OEM's don't like it when people do ANYTHING that might be used to overclock the system), then the latency would likely be higher and the RAM speed would likely be lower if everything is at default.

The only way you can potentially ensure that your RAM is operating at decently low latencies and high frequencies it advertises is if you can get a RAM with low JEDEC timings (such as say CL17) and high frequency right out of the factory like this one:
HyperX Impact HX429S17IBK2/64 Memory 64GB Kit*(2x32GB) 2933 MHz DDR4 CL17 SODIMM
https://www.kingston.com/dataSheets/HX429S17IBK2_64.pdf

That's the only laptop RAM I know of which has low timings and higher frequencies independent of the XMP profiles.

Unfortunately, laptop RAM is frequently produced with low speeds and high timings (unlike the desktop counterparts)... and because of the usual lack of XMP profiles in laptop BIOS, its virtually impossible to use XMP ready so-dimms to run at their optimal speeds.

On AMD laptops that have desktop grade CPU's for example, its possible to sometime use Ryzen Master to affect the frequency and timings of RAM... however, this can be dangerous because the changes are integrated on a BIOS level... so if you set up the RAM timings and frequencies to something the RAM can't handle, you risk not being able to use the machine anymore (short of a hard BIOS reset which isn't always guaranteed to work on a laptop, and of course a potential reprogramming of the BIOS chip itself with the stock or latest functional BIOS version).

Unless your machine comes with XMP profiles option in the BIOS, I don't think you'll be able to modify the RAM speeds.
As such, you might be better off getting a RAM such as HyperX Impact HX429S17IBK2/64 which has low JEDEC timings and high enough frequencies (2933 MhZ - which when combined with low latencies would effectively be just as fast or faster than 3200MhZ RAM with higher timings)

 

Thank you. My MSI BIOS is highly customizable and I got the Crucial Ballistix 3200Mhz CL16 and it runs great in Gear2. Now I'm playing with trying to get it to run in Gear1 without errors. Someone mentioned lowering the TRFC to 500 (default is 560) so I'll give that a shot. If that doesn't work I'll switch back to Gear2 and just be happy with it. This is the fastest RAM they make for the 11800H so I've got no complaints.

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You can check with @Falkentyne for proper tuning.

 

'Fastest' is very relative though.
As I said, a 2933 MhZ so-dimm with JEDEC timings at CL17 would definitely run as fast if not faster than say 3200MhZ so-dimm which has high timings of about CL20 or 22. If your RAM is running at advertised speed and timings (3200MhZ and CL16 as is), then you don't have much to worry about and I doubt you can improve upon that - I certainly wouldn't try to push it beyond those parameters.