Upgrade a ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero to enhance your existing Ram setup.
Upgrade a ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero to enhance your existing Ram setup.
Hey there, I'm trying to upgrade my Dark hero setup with G.SKILL Ram's F4-3600C14D dual channel kit, which has two 16GB modules. I'm thinking about getting it bigger—64GB total—and wondering if I can buy the same kit again for a second run of 16GB each time. My CPU is a 5950X, so I want to make sure everything works smoothly. Any advice?
There are compatibility issues, but because the kit is guaranteed B die, they’re not major concerns. The main challenge could be the CPU’s memory controller. All these modules are dual-rank, so you’ll effectively have quad-rank memory. Ryzen doesn’t handle quad-rank well, and a B die failure puts a lot of stress on the controller. It will definitely crash at JEDEC, though whether XMP loads and stays stable at 3600MT/s depends on chance. You might improve things by raising the SOC voltage to 1.15V, but that only helps slightly. The dark hero isn’t particularly strong in memory interfaces either, which could also limit performance. In the worst case, you’d lower the frequency to 3466MT/s while keeping XMP timings, and it should work.
I’d reset the CMOS and try it out. You might need to lower the voltage to 3200, though that probably isn’t a big issue. In fact, I believe Zen3 performs better than B-Die. Most of the other issues seem to be elsewhere.