This is a fun one. Today we have a review of one of the highest capacity and speed ECC DDR5 RDIMM kits on the market. After our V-Color 256GB 8x 32GB DDR5-6400 RDIMM kit mini-review, the company asked if we wanted to take a look at a kit for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X. We declined because it felt like 128GB in a 4x 32GB kit and having 64 cores/ 128 threads was a bit light on capacity. A few weeks later, V-Color said they had something better: a 4x 48GB kit for 192GB that runs at an insanely fast DDR5-7200 speed.
Insanely Fast V-Color DDR5-7200 192GB ECC RDIMM Kit
At first, some folks on our team did not believe we had an ECC RDIMM kit rated for DDR5-7200 speeds, and at 48GB per DIMM. Here is the box with the PC5-57600 specs. You can see the 3Gx8 2Rx8 rating.
The kit itself looks like a standard V-Color memory. We get a chrome heat spreader that covers the DIMM. It also helps keep the DIMMs (and fingers) a bit more protected during installation.
One of the challenges with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper non-Pro series is that it only has four DDR5 RDIMM slots. As a result, both memory capacity and bandwidth can be a challenge with 64-core CPUs.
One other important note is that with DDR5 memory, desktop UDIMM memory cannot be used in servers and workstations with DDR5 RIMM slots. This is a change from DDR3 and DDR4 eras. We covered this in Why DDR5 is Absolutely Necessary in Modern Servers.
As a result, in the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 platform, one ends up with four memory channels and four DIMM slots but up to 64 fast cores. The question then becomes how to maximize both capacity and performance in those four channels. That is exactly what V-Color has addressed with this kit.
V-Color DDR5-7200 192GB ECC RDIMM Performance
In the ASUS Pro WS TRX50 SAGE WIFI motherboard we used for our AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X Review, we have had great success with the automated overclocking.
For some perspective, we have seen better performance on things like Cinebench from this 64 core platform than the Dell Precision Threadripper Pro platform. That is due to the higher TDP that ASUS lets the chips hit with liquid cooling, as well as the overclocking features.
When we first reviewed that platform, we showed a DDR5-6200 G.Skill kit with 32GB per DIMM for only 128GB of RAM. We review mini PCs with 96GB these days, so that feels low on a big platform like this.
We tried the DDR5-7200 setting, but we ended up with slightly better (1-2%) application performance using the ASUS automatic overclocking feature with these DIMMs. We got a bit of a FSB downclock which pushed these to DDR5-6961. Still the memory bandwidth was much higher. That is an advantage of getting high-speed DIMMs like this. Even if they are slightly down-clocked, they can offer performance gains.
Something that was worth showing really quickly is just how much memory bandwidth this is giving. Comparing the overclocked 4-channel kit to a stock Xeon W at DDR5-4800 in 8-channel memory mode we are lower as one would expect. Stil, it is more like 10-20% lower than being half as the raw channels would indicate.
That is a really cool finding since it helps to bridge the memory bandwidth gap between Xeon W and Threadripper (non-Pro) by using modules like this. We can eek out more memory bandwidth from the modules running at DDR5-7200 as well, but we lose application performance versus running the FSB at a lower speed.
Final Words
V-Color modules are generally not cheap, with very premium list prices. However, this is one of the companies that actually gets modules qualified on systems and motherboards, which means that many bespoke builders can use them.
At some point, I think we wish V-Color had these in 4x 64GB or even 4x 128GB capacities just to add a lot more memory capacity to the platform. At the same time, this is where the non-binary 48GB memory modules pay off. The Threadripper platform is great, but the memory capacity and bandwidth are the big challenges. V-Color has a kit to address this shortcoming in the platform.
We also have a short 30-second video on these modules:
Was there any application or benchmark where the faster memory made a noticeable difference?
What explains the slower cache speeds in the 7200MHz test with the Threadripper though?
L3 performance is less than 50% than with the 6200Mhz modules?
What happend to cache L1 L2 and L3 results? With higher speed of ram the speed of cache go down?