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Motherboard memory bus speed
I'm about to build a desktop PC first time in many years and I was confused by the following discrepancy related to memory speeds:
- Zen5 CPUs "natively" support DDR5-5600 RAM (for example 9600X)
- even faster DDR5 modules are available, I have seen at least DDR5-6400
Yet motherboards, even with the newest X870E chipset support only up to DDR5-5200 "natively" and require overclocking for higher speeds (for example the currently most expensive Gigabyte model X870E AORUS MASTER).
So my first question is what are the possible disadvantages of setting a motherboard's memory bus to an overclocked speed that is "natively" supported by both the CPU and the DDR5 modules I intend to purchase.
The second question is why is it so? What stops motherboard producers to "natively" support speeds that already are already "natively" supported by CPUs and DDR5 modules that these motherboards were designed for?
PS: I put the word natively in quotes as I'm not sure if it's the right adjective to describe the speed at which a given component works without overclocking.
Update: specs from other manufacturers have been recently published and many of them do support 5600 "natively" (for example MSI Tomahawk).
2 answers
With overclocking, it's probably just the standard caveats:
- It might damage your hardware (although this seems unlikely for merely changing memory speeds)
- Your software might become unstable (BSODs and crashes out of nowhere)
- Not every unit is equal, so you might have to keep returning products and buying new ones until you get the lucky one
I don't know any specific reason why they would support one speed but not another slightly faster one. Usually, a few months later the same manufacturer will release a similar product that does support the faster speed. So it is clearly not difficult to do.
My guess would be that when a new speed becomes common in the consumer market, the manufacturer doesn't want to slow down product development by telling all the in-progress products to halt and update their design. Only product cycles that begin afterwards incorporate the new speed, and even then, they don't always bother. A simple release of a new processor or memory chip is also not enough for them to decide to support it - they might be waiting for some nebulous "consumer traction" first. So they lag behind the latest speed by about the length of their product development cycle.
Generally, memory speed doesn't seem to matter much for performance and most consumers don't care about it much. A lot of those that do care, don't actually understand what it does, but just believe the marketing, which can be done regardless of technical features. So there's not much reason for manufacturers to be very strict about supporting the fastest memory speeds.
Also, looking at their products as a whole, these companies seem pretty hit and miss. I think it's not a stretch to conclude that they are, to some extent, mismanaged and have incompetent product managers. We can't expect them to release products that perfectly fit the needs of the market even if they wanted to.
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Depending on your use case - historically RAM speed hasn't mattered that much. AMD's APUs were memory speed dependent, but that was for the video adaptor. It's also worth noting many PC builders tend to be enthusiasts, and there's always been a overclocking scene. Binning, and selling ram that runs faster is just good business sense.
I'm a big fan of Puget Systems' blogs for things like this. They do a ton of real world testing, and they've done benchmarks going into detail about the impact of faster/OCed RAM.
The advantage is you can squeeze small amounts of extra performance, either using automatic or manual overclocking methods. However the 'default' speeds are going to be stable. You'd be getting 5-7% performance improvement but also risking application and OS instability.
The 'native' non OC speeds are what the manufacturers tested and know work reliably. In some cases either because it's a newer board, or the manufacturer found it's better for the system.
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