[PLUS] Practice: Optimizing subtimings for DDR4 RAM for Ryzen 5000

High performance with RAM tuning?

Sure, the new platforms with DDR5 RAM support offer cutting-edge performance and niceties like PCI-Express 5.0, but if you’re already running a Ryzen system that you’re basically happy with, you don’t necessarily have to break the bank to buy this one or get other additional fps. An interesting option is RAM tuning, which, in contrast to CPU overclocking, has the advantage that the energy requirement only increases moderately. This is not only positive in view of rising electricity prices, but also saves you from additional expenses if the PC does not have high cooling reserves. In the following, we show what scope and additional performance there is if you don’t just rely on a superficial RAM overclocking or XMP.

Tuning for the patient

For this article we use a Ryzen 7 5700X, whose core clock we have fixed at 4.4 GHz. This has the advantage that the CPU performance in benchmarks is more constant than with dynamic clock control. Measurement fluctuations of one or two percent that occur anyway, as shown by almost every benchmark, are already problematic enough when it comes to being able to assess the effect of individual subtimings, as you will see below. Regardless of whether you overclock your CPU or not, one thing is of the utmost importance: you must be sure that your PC is not experiencing any stability problems before you embark on extensive RAM tuning. You will inevitably encounter the problem that a configuration is unstable again and again. Occasionally, this will also happen when you do not expect it – for example, if a setting that had been stress-tested for hours the day before is revealed to be unstable within a few seconds or minutes the next day. It can be bitter enough when you find out at some point when sounding out the timings that the cause is not the currently tightened option, but a latency that was adjusted days ago, but which was not previously discovered. However, if in the end an overclocked or undervolted CPU is the culprit, this late realization may throw you back to the beginning.

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