Hades Canyon and Memory: Just How Fast Can it Go?

My recent post about using faster RAM in a Hades Canyon showed that although the specifications list 2400MHz RAM for Hades, it can accommodate faster memory speeds, with a corresponding performance boost. I was able to compare 2400MHz RAM to 2666MHz RAM and found 2666MHz was indeed faster.  I wondered just how much faster Hades Canyon could go with RAM, and  I had a conversation with someone on the NUC team. While he’d prefer to remain anonymous, he did offer to test his Hades Canyon with different speeds of RAM that were even faster than 2666MHz. He sent me the results, and they’re very interesting.

He was able to test his Hades Canyon with the following memory:

• G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 (2800Mhz)
• Corsair Vengeance DDR4 (3000MHz)
• G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 (3200MHz)

To keep things aligned with my tests, he used a single 16GB stick.  Now this will not be a perfect test because not all of the RAM is from the same manufacturer, and without testing RAM of the same speed from different brands, we can’t know how they compare. But it’ll work as a rough test. I asked my friend to use Performance Test by Passmark so the I could compare them to the tests I’d done.

Here are the results of his tests and mine combined:

Here they are in chart form:

As I said before, this isn’t a clean test because the brands of memory are different. For example, the Crucial 2666MHz ram outperformed the G.Skill 2800 RAM. In fact, the G. Skill RAM didn’t do well at all.  Its 3200MHz stick should have been the fastest overall, but it under-performed compared to the (theoretically slower) Corsair 3000MHz stick.  But what the test does show is Hades Canyon CAN take advantage of the faster speeds.  The 2800MHz G. Skill RAM should have already been well past Hades Canyon’s limit, but it still saw improvement.  The big winner here was the Corsair RAM, which easily beat all comers.

My friend mentioned when he swapped out the memory Task Manager still reported it as 2400MHz, but when I checked, it showed the correct speed:

I also verified the speed with CPU-Z as well, so I’m not sure what happened with his tests. He said he verified the values himself, so it was only Task Manager that showed the slower speed. A little odd, but as long as the performance is there, not a big deal.

So the plot thickens with Hades Canyon and its memory capabilities: even though it lists 2400MHz, that little plus sign next to the speed seems to mean it’ll accept much faster RAM and run it as such. Between my tests and my friends’, we’ve gone all the way to 3200MHz.  I’m sure there’s a speed where Hades Canyon will max out, but we haven’t found it yet.