Memory Overclocking on X470 Pinnacle Ridge: What RAM Speed Do You Need?

Test System and Setup

Since our X470 Gaming Pro Carbon's firmware was a few revisions behind out of the box, we updated the motherboard to the latest public BIOS. Memory support can improve tremendously from one revision to another. It's good practice to always use the latest revision for your BIOS to ensure proper support for new memory kits. For our testing, we left all the BIOS settings at their default stock values.

For the operating system, we used a fresh 64-bit installation of Windows 10 Professional with the October 2018 Update. We also updated the test system's drivers, benchmarking programs, and game clients to the latest versions available. Here's a thorough list of the parts in our test setup.

We picked and tested eight different memory speeds starting from JEDEC's DDR4-2133 guideline to DDR4-3466. Rather than utilizing the default profiles inside the BIOS, we've opted for a manual setup. Afterward, we verified the memory speed inside the operating system with CPU-Z. We ran each benchmark three times and picked the median value as the final result for comparison between each memory configuration. Below is a list of all our test speeds and timings. On the next page, we'll dig into the tests, and start to get a sense of how memory speeds affect performance on Ryzen.

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