Helios 500 AMD 2700/Vega 56 Laptop - should I be looking at RAM/SSD upgrades at all?

BurnsXL

So I've got another thread going about the likely non-support of the 3700x CPU, which is a huge bummer.

What I'm wondering is whether I'll see any significant framerate gains in Overwatch, Apex Legends, etc., in 1080p on Ultra or High settings IF I upgrade this thing. AIUI the Ryzen really benefits from faster RAM, and I know it's always smarter to run things off of a separate SSD from your boot drive. 

Does anyone have any sense of what type of performance increase I'd see from upping the RAM to 2666 or 3200 (if possible), or adding a 2nd SSD to the computer? What about 2700->2700x + either or both of those upgrades?

Thanks in advance...really hoping to find a way to get the 3700x working on this. 

kingmetal

The motherboard doesn't appear to support XMP, so it's unlikely that any RAM above 2666 will work - and even 2666 is questionable. Some amazon reviews have pointed to specific RAM modules that support 2666 JEDEC profiles, which would mean that replacing ALL the RAM in the system with this RAM might allow it all to run at 2666 but it's unclear if this really works. I suspect the performance increase would not be zero, but wouldn't be worth the trouble and expense. I got similarly excited about my machine before it arrived and pre-planned some upgrades - my advice to you is to just enjoy it, I suspect you won't have any issues with the out-of-the-box performance. It'd be great it Acer had put faster RAM in, since Zen+ really likes tight timings and high RAM clocks, but some compromises had to be made somewhere and it's not the end of the world.

xapim

Hyperx will always work fine at 2666 even if windows only recognizes it at 2400 its working at 2666

bobzdar

As above, you need ram with jedec profile above 2400mhz (xmp doesn't work).  I have on my list of things to do using thaiphoon burner to create a high speed jedec profile on a set of high speed (3000mhz) hyperx ram I have but haven't gotten around to it. Even with a 3000mhz profile it might still be limited to 2666, which imo would not even be worth disassembling the system to put in.

Your best bet is tuning the timings on the installed ram, I dropped mine from cl17 to cl14, which provided a decent speed increase as latency is important on ryzen (more so than bandwidth, at least for most apps). 2400 cl14 is similar to 2666 cl16 latency wise.  Just be careful as if you get a setting that boots but is unstable, you may not be able to revert without doing a full cmos reset (ie pull cmos battery) as it can only be set via ryzen master, so if you get a setup that boots but is too unstable to load windows and get into ryzen master, you'll be doing that. If it fails to boot 3x it'll reset to default timings. 

BurnsXL

Interesting...I'll be very conscious about this. Really not looking to put anything in it that isn't meant to work, outside of the hail-mary 3700x. 

Looks like I bought RAM that I both might not need and that might not fit:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BMMVNL4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I thought that DDR4 SO-DIMM would work, wasn't aware that there were sub-classes. The SATA M.2 I got definitely will work, and maybe it's best just to leave it with that.

If anybody has a recommended RAM add-on that will work on Amazon I'd appreciate a link, as I have to either exchange or return what I got it seems.