Intro
I recently bought 2 16GB sticks of “Ultimax DDR4 2666MHz” RAM. I wanted to increase the amount of RAM I have available to my system on a budget, and this looked like a good candidate. I do not particularly care about the performance that fast RAM gives. What matters to me more is capacity so I can run more VMs.
System
The system I have is the following:
- Asrock A320M Motherboard
- Ryzen 3200G Processor
- 8GB of Kingston Hyperx RAM
It did not work
The first thing I did was to pop off the 8GB Kingston stick and put in the 2x Ultimax sticks … and it did not POST.
I tried only putting one stick in, and then the other. Its unlikely that I would receive 2 defective brand new sticks, so I tried another system. I then tried it on an i5-7500, and it POSTed just fine. I then ran memtest to check if there were any errors. I finished one pass and there were none.
Weird. So I have 2 sticks of RAM that work perfectly fine under an Intel system, but fail to boot under a Ryzen system.
Workaround
Since I now know that the RAM sticks do indeed work, I tried putting in one of the Ultimax sticks together with the Kingston stick. And it worked!
Upon closer inspection in the BIOS screen, I see that the Ultimax RAM does not have a vendor, version, or any of the other information filled in. It only says DDR4 2666. The Kingston one has an XMP profile set for 2666MHz 1.2v 19-19-19-43. According to the Intel system, the Ultimax had 19-19-19-43.
I’m gonna guess that the Intel system I tried can cope with unlabelled, generic RAM, while the AMD system I tried relies on the data on the RAM stick itself to set RAM timings. I cannot verify this myself, but this seems to be the case.
The motherboard only has 2 RAM slots, and I was hoping to use them both to get to 32GB. Because of this, if I wanted to use the higher capacity RAM, I can only fit 1 16GB stick and 1 8GB stick, for a total of 24GB (instead of 32 😞).
Testing on a B450
I borrowed a B450 board to test this on and I got the exact same results. The ultimax sticks would not work by themselves, but when a Kingston RAM stick was in there, the system was able to POST.
Conclusion
I hope this helps someone who is having the same problem, or someone on the fence of buying this cheap RAM. You get what you pay for I guess. I did get functional RAM, just not compatible RAM for the system I wanted to use it on.