A Technical Tweaking Tour
The timings and frequency of the memory on AMD Ryzen systems is very important and has been for some time, more so that on Intel systems. The trick has always been tweaking your main memory clock (MCLK) to match 1:1 with your processor’s memory controller (IMC) while keeping an eye on your Infinity Fabric Clock (IFC, or FCLK). It has become traditional to try to hit 3000MHz UCLK, 6000Hz effective but with the newer boards a UCLK of 3200MHz might be possible. However if you just up the UCLK to 3200MHz, your motherboard will likely drop the IMC to 1600Mz, a 2:1 ratio which will actually reduce your performance.
In many cases XMP and EXPO will do the hard work for you, but if you find it doesn’t give you the settings you want, or you simply like tweaking your memory manually then OC Inside has the guide for you. They use a tool called ZenTimings to see exactly what timings and frequencies are set to on their system. It is invaluable when tweaking AMD memory settings, and you should familiarize yourself if you haven’t used it. Check out how they managed to reduce memory latency on their test system by 23% in this article.
Make sure to save a working version of your BIOS settings before starting your tweaking journey, you might even want to write some of your key settings down in case you end up having to completely reset your BIOS if things go wrong, which they can.