No, B450 motherboards are not expected to be marked down at this time.
No, B450 motherboards are not expected to be marked down at this time.
I still trusted dual channel, but a recent Gamer's Nexus review suggested it wasn’t a major factor. I’d likely upgrade to a second stick in a year. Two 4GB 3200MHz kits cost more than one 8GB 2400MHz unit, which is why I chose the latter. Starting with a 2400MHz stick also made sense since Ryzen performs better at that speed. Most boards I considered had four slots—should I go with a 2x4GB 2400MHz kit?
I'm really pumped about the Mac Pro upgrade. I already disassembled it and took out all the components (I got it for $20, which was awesome). I have several reference images of what I want to achieve. I'm eager to finally create a PC that feels great to use and looks nice—something with a solid theme instead of the last build that lacked one. How would you approach this with my budget? 1600AF, 2x4gb RAM, and a good B450 GPU?
Ryzen benefits from higher frequency memory... there's a nice bump in performance going from 2400 to 2666, and from 2666 to 2800-2933-3000 Mhz, but from there to higher frequencies there is some performance but smaller.... think of it like something like +2% performance from 2400->2666 mzh , +1..1.5% from 2666 to 2933-3000 Mhz , + <0.5% from 3000 to 3200 mhz , + <0.25% from 3200 to 3600 mhz So from 2400 Mhz to 3600 Mhz there may be something like 4.5-5% increase, but nearly 4% of that is up to 3000 Mhz. Chasing that last less than 1% performance increase (between 3000 mhz and 3600 mhz) is often not worth the price increase. When they were first released Ryzen 1xxx processors had problems running memories at more than 2933-3000 Mhz ... the bioses weren't optimized and the cpu microcode (like a tiny bios inside the cpu) lacked code for wide memory compatibility, so some memory chips were supported better than others. Since the launch, AMD has released multiple microcode updates which are distributed inside bios updates, so each time you update the bios, after bios is updated the motherboard "uploads" microcode into the cpu making it better. So over time, through bios updates, the AMD Ryzen 1xxx processors got increased memory compatibility support, so some memory sticks that could only run at 2666 mhz at launch could run at 3000 mhz 6 months later, after a few bios updates. With most recent bios updates on a decent motherboard Ryzen 1xxx processors should support up to 3200 Mhz and even 3600 mhz memory sticks will be accepted, but may not work at more than 3200 mhz - the memory controller inside the chip is just not that perfect. Ryzen 2xxx processors (and 1600af , 1200af which are basically renamed ryzen 2xxx processors) have an improved memory controller (at the hardware level) making it easier for the processors to run memory at even 3600 mhz, but again the performance increase from 3200 to 3600 mhz or even from 3000 to 3200 is small.... Ignoring the price factor, yeah, the best memory you could run on ryzen 2xxx processors is 3600 mhz, but if you keep price in mind, 3200 mhz is enough for ryzen 2xxx processors. Yeah, dual channel is actually important, it doubles the bandwidth and can improve performance especially with low vram video cards, where a video game may have to constantly swap textures between system ram and video card ram. If you have a 8 GB video card and a higher core count cpu it may be the case dual channel won't matter that much, but at the low end every bit helps, so dual channel will make a difference in your case. It's not that important to sacrifice frequency for it... stick to a single stick at higher frequency but don't forget to add a 2nd stick at a later point. Doesn't have to be same model, same maker, as long as the frequency rating and timings are similar they'll work in dual channel.
Great! Thanks for the update. After reviewing the parts, I see the 1x8 3200mhz model at $35.99 and the 2x4 3200mhz at $47.99. The extra $12 seems worthwhile, especially since I plan to keep the 8GB drives for a while.