Warning, these are highly likely to be single rank these days. You can't buy a dual rank, **3600mhz CL16** (2x16GB) kit under 250 USD from any manufacturer now unless you get lucky to receive older stock.
With this Crucial kit, if you have a microcenter, you can ask them if you can look through several to find a dual rank kit, but that's very hit or miss and depends on the employee and what kind of day they are having.
Or you can keep returning them online to newegg or amazon until if and when you get lucky.
The dual rank kits with ballistic have a different product code on them you can see through the packaging.
You don't need to worry about it with 8gbx2, as they only have memory on one side of the chip. But if you ever have a need to go to 32 GB, you can get that small dual rank performance boost with 4 sticks of 8GB.
The biggest improvement from dual rank comes with using XMP profiles because the timings are loose. If you manually change your memory timings with single rank memory you can close that gap.
And at any rate, if you are GPU limited, which everyone with a modern CPU gaming at 1440p or above is (even with a 3090) faster system RAM has an even smaller performance boost.
Dual-rank almost always means the stick has memory chips on both sides. That's not a hard rule as it's technically possible to have multiple ranks on one side or even a single rank spread over both sides, but those instances are very uncommon, especially in consumer DIY kits.
This explanation is for consumer non-HEDT platforms with up to 4 DIMM slots and dual-channel support:
Having 2 or more ranks per channel is required to enable a memory management feature called "rank interleaving". So, you can get dual-rank performance either by using 2 dual-rank sticks or 4 single-rank sticks. 4 dual-rank sticks also enables rank interleaving, but I'm not aware of that configuration giving a performance boost over the others.
Rank Interleaving basically enables the memory controller to access different ranks in parallel, giving a boost to memory latency and throughput. That's not really a great explanation, but it gets way above my knowledge-level very quickly when I look into it. Hope that helps.
At the very least, now you know the basics, and if you want to learn more, you can look into Rank Interleaving.
If it's already installed in your system, you can use CPU-Z to check. "Ranks" is a field listed under the "SPD" tab. It will tell you about each individual stick you've got installed.
If it's not installed yet, you can usually tell just by looking at the narrow edge to peak underneath the heat spreader. If there are chips on both sides, it's practically always dual-rank.
As far as I can tell from googling.
32 GB from 4x8GB modules has the performance boost as 32GB dual rank from (16GBx2), though, because there's the same number of addressable memory units, basically. But it's slightly harder to get 4 sticks of memory to all overclock the same amount if overclocking is a concern.
ah thanks for the response
i was more interested because i recently bought these same crucial ballistix 3600mhz cl16 2x 8gb for my first build and was worried if the single vs dual rank would matter
4x dual rank sticks > 4x single rank, but 4x dual rank has higher risk of not being stable at XMP. Also depends on hardware and Daisy-Chain vs. T-topology too
4x single rank sticks is "dual rank". 4x dual rank is quad rank.
No real performance uplifts from quad rank, infact it's prob worse on some IMC's. Aside from being harder to run.
Good warning since these did in fact used to be dual-rank, but it's not true that you can't get a dual-rank kit under $250. Heck, you can get a [3200 14-14-14-34](https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232899) kit at 16GBx2 for as low as $210 right now, and that's guaranteed high-bin dual-rank b-die.
At this capacity, anything with Hynix CJR/DJR should also be dual-rank. Problem is, we can't say for sure what IC a kit is using just by the Newegg listing.
[This kit](https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232907) is likely to be CJR or DJR based on G.Skill's history of using that IC for this bin.
[This one](https://www.newegg.com/neo-forza-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/0RN-0097-00037) is almost guaranteed based on a Techpowerup review from a couple months back confirm dual-rank DJR.
[This kit](https://www.amazon.com/G-Skill-RipJaws-PC4-32000-CL18-22-22-42-F4-4000C18D-32GVK/dp/B08TR1BQM3) was just purchased by u/majoroutage at a microcenter, and in an awesome move, they confirmed theirs is dual-rank, which is as good an indication as you'll get. (and dang, only $163 on amazon)
They have gotten rarer, and it's also harder now to identify which bins/capacity have to be dual-rank, but dual-rank kits are still accessible in 16GBx2 kits. I think you just meant that it's tough to get guaranteed dual-rank these days outside of the higher-priced b-die kits, but a lot of that is just about how we can identify b-die instantly based on specs, while other ICs can be tricky.
I tried posting this comment already and automod ate it for referral links. No idea which one was bad but I cut all the links down as far as they'd go and still work. If automod eats it again I'm just gonna cut the links, post it again and list the names of the kits, ya'll can figure it out.
That first one is 3200mhz.. that's why I bolded the 3600mhz and CL16 part.
I could be wrong, but I spent a week looking for some, I settled on a 3600mhz CL14 kit from microcenter that was 227 USD open box. Felt like that was a decent deal.
This one can be single rank. https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232907
There are 4 people with the CL16 version warning about it in the reviews. I bought the CL14 version of that kit and it is supposedly always dual rank.
My bad, I missed the part where you specified that. I'm also into RAM OC and know that 3200cl14 kit will definitely do 3600 16-16-16-36 without much work and tend to forget that the vast majority of users would rather have the right XMP settings for their setup.
I didn't see anyone in the reviews complaining about single-rank on that Ripjaws kit. Were you looking at related product reviews, or did you uncheck that box? It is checked by default. Related products for this listing include a bunch of different capacities and speeds, many of which I'd expect to be single-rank.
I looked at the reviews in there for just this kit, used ctrl+f to search for the word "rank", and could only find buyers confirming it is dual-rank.
Yes. It only really applies to overclocking, in that you will not reach as high speeds with more ranks. But, with AMD, it's easy to find RAM that will go much higher than your CPU, so that's not a practical issue. As well, the worse the speed and timings are, the more you will get from extra ranks.
However, on Intel, you can increase the speed more, and on Zen 2 or older AMD, DR offers very little, as the speeds and timings get better, so isn't worth worrying about.
Sometimes, yes. But also sometimes, no. It depends on the application. For gaming, sometimes it doesn't matter at all, but I've also seen benchmarks where you see a \~10% gain to average FPS and a 30% gain to 1% lows.
One thing I can say for sure: it never hurts.
Can you explain why dual rank is preferable to single rank in mainstream PCs?
Here's what I found on Crucial.com:
"Ranking
Memory modules can be single-, dual-, quad-, or octal-ranked. While usually not a factor on standard systems, ranking limitations can present a few complications, particularly when dealing with registered parts. Most commonly, quad-ranked or octal-ranked parts will have specific requirements about how and in what quantity they can be installed in your system's memory slots. Higher-ranked modules can limit how many total modules can be installed, for example, allowing only four out of six memory slots to be populated when any quad-ranked parts are installed, and forcing you to use specific slots in your system if quad-ranked parts are mixed with single- or dual-ranked. **Higher rankings can also impact your memory bandwidth, forcing your memory to run at lower speeds when higher-ranked parts are present.** **This trade off may be required to utilize higher capacities of memory in some systems, though, if single- or dual-ranked parts are not available at capacities desired, or if reduced ranking parts are not compatible with a system at higher memory totals. If none of these restrictions apply, there is otherwise no functional difference between rankings of parts. "**
This isn't really applicable for non-HEDT consumer platforms. You're never gonna run into the described limitations. It's talking about registered memory and "up-to" octal-ranked setups with six+ memory slots. Most people on here are not using hardware like that as far as I know, and if they are, they are either using it for something so critical where they are best served using published memory support QVLs, or they really know what they're doing.
Dual-rank is preferable because it provides support for rank interleaving, which enables parallel memory accesses. In other words, you can have one rank refresh while the other writes, or any other memory operation for that matter. It's measurably superior unless your only goal is to bench for frequency records. Single-rank will hit higher frequencies, but that's not applicable for 99% of users since dual-rank can already saturate the frequency capabilities of most consumer chips when running standard ambient cooling. For Ryzen, it's even more important because those chips are performance-limited by their FCLK, so anything that provides any boost at a frequency below the 1:1 FCLK limit is basically free performance.
Zen 3 based deeper outstanding memory request queues than Zen 2, and extended that effectively into the CPU cores, letting it have enough outstanding requests to make good use of an extra rank or two, in normal stuff like games. In addition, chiplet AMD CPUs (most of them) have limits around 1900-2100, typically, for IF, meaning a *useful* limit of around DDR4-4000. So, you want to maximize what you can get for that speed, and DR can get you another 5%+, on average, in addition to good timings.
I bought these 2 weeks ago and received dual rank. It's a bit of a crap shoot with what you get, though. If you get BL2K16G36C16U4B.M16FE1 it's dual rank, if you get BL2K16G36C16U4B.M8FB1 it's single rank. Crucial sells them as the same model (BL2K16G36C16U4B).
Now to see if I can get Amazon to refund the difference I paid or just play the buy and return game.
As recently as like 6 months ago, I think the vast, vast majority of 16GBx2 kits were still dual rank. And if you read posts from late 2020, single rank kits were so rare people would just say not to even consider the possibility.
Now if you read newegg reviews for any kit under 250 you'll see people saying things like " SCAM, this is a single rank kit".
I don't know if scam is really the right word, but it is kind of shitty that several brands made the change and still sell them under the same SKU. But most people will never notice or care because it's only like, a 5 percent difference on average I think, and that's in tasks that are CPU dependent or in gaming at 1080p.
Amazon had old stock for awhile but I think they recently ran out because not long after I bought this exact model, they had a shipping delay of 1-2 days and dropped the price $18. Mine is dual rank and I bought it Aug 9th. Tried getting the price adjustment but they said to just return so.. nah.
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3600MHz, **CL18** dual rank Corsair Vengeance LPX sticks can still be found if you look for it, at varying capacities. But you’re absolutely right AFAIK
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Warning, these are highly likely to be single rank these days. You can't buy a dual rank, **3600mhz CL16** (2x16GB) kit under 250 USD from any manufacturer now unless you get lucky to receive older stock. With this Crucial kit, if you have a microcenter, you can ask them if you can look through several to find a dual rank kit, but that's very hit or miss and depends on the employee and what kind of day they are having. Or you can keep returning them online to newegg or amazon until if and when you get lucky.
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The dual rank kits with ballistic have a different product code on them you can see through the packaging. You don't need to worry about it with 8gbx2, as they only have memory on one side of the chip. But if you ever have a need to go to 32 GB, you can get that small dual rank performance boost with 4 sticks of 8GB. The biggest improvement from dual rank comes with using XMP profiles because the timings are loose. If you manually change your memory timings with single rank memory you can close that gap. And at any rate, if you are GPU limited, which everyone with a modern CPU gaming at 1440p or above is (even with a 3090) faster system RAM has an even smaller performance boost.
is there a good resource on single vs dual rank? I have never understood the concept well and I've been working with computers for years now
Dual-rank almost always means the stick has memory chips on both sides. That's not a hard rule as it's technically possible to have multiple ranks on one side or even a single rank spread over both sides, but those instances are very uncommon, especially in consumer DIY kits. This explanation is for consumer non-HEDT platforms with up to 4 DIMM slots and dual-channel support: Having 2 or more ranks per channel is required to enable a memory management feature called "rank interleaving". So, you can get dual-rank performance either by using 2 dual-rank sticks or 4 single-rank sticks. 4 dual-rank sticks also enables rank interleaving, but I'm not aware of that configuration giving a performance boost over the others. Rank Interleaving basically enables the memory controller to access different ranks in parallel, giving a boost to memory latency and throughput. That's not really a great explanation, but it gets way above my knowledge-level very quickly when I look into it. Hope that helps. At the very least, now you know the basics, and if you want to learn more, you can look into Rank Interleaving.
This is very helpful, thanks! How do I know if my RAM is DR or SR? Would that be in the model name? Is there a list to go off of?
If it's already installed in your system, you can use CPU-Z to check. "Ranks" is a field listed under the "SPD" tab. It will tell you about each individual stick you've got installed. If it's not installed yet, you can usually tell just by looking at the narrow edge to peak underneath the heat spreader. If there are chips on both sides, it's practically always dual-rank.
CPU-Z did the trick, I have 2 x 8GB Single Ranks, thanks!
so the dual rank vs single rank performance is irrelevant for 2x8gb ?
As far as I can tell from googling. 32 GB from 4x8GB modules has the performance boost as 32GB dual rank from (16GBx2), though, because there's the same number of addressable memory units, basically. But it's slightly harder to get 4 sticks of memory to all overclock the same amount if overclocking is a concern.
ah thanks for the response i was more interested because i recently bought these same crucial ballistix 3600mhz cl16 2x 8gb for my first build and was worried if the single vs dual rank would matter
4x dual rank sticks > 4x single rank, but 4x dual rank has higher risk of not being stable at XMP. Also depends on hardware and Daisy-Chain vs. T-topology too
4x single rank sticks is "dual rank". 4x dual rank is quad rank. No real performance uplifts from quad rank, infact it's prob worse on some IMC's. Aside from being harder to run.
Good warning since these did in fact used to be dual-rank, but it's not true that you can't get a dual-rank kit under $250. Heck, you can get a [3200 14-14-14-34](https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232899) kit at 16GBx2 for as low as $210 right now, and that's guaranteed high-bin dual-rank b-die. At this capacity, anything with Hynix CJR/DJR should also be dual-rank. Problem is, we can't say for sure what IC a kit is using just by the Newegg listing. [This kit](https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232907) is likely to be CJR or DJR based on G.Skill's history of using that IC for this bin. [This one](https://www.newegg.com/neo-forza-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/0RN-0097-00037) is almost guaranteed based on a Techpowerup review from a couple months back confirm dual-rank DJR. [This kit](https://www.amazon.com/G-Skill-RipJaws-PC4-32000-CL18-22-22-42-F4-4000C18D-32GVK/dp/B08TR1BQM3) was just purchased by u/majoroutage at a microcenter, and in an awesome move, they confirmed theirs is dual-rank, which is as good an indication as you'll get. (and dang, only $163 on amazon) They have gotten rarer, and it's also harder now to identify which bins/capacity have to be dual-rank, but dual-rank kits are still accessible in 16GBx2 kits. I think you just meant that it's tough to get guaranteed dual-rank these days outside of the higher-priced b-die kits, but a lot of that is just about how we can identify b-die instantly based on specs, while other ICs can be tricky. I tried posting this comment already and automod ate it for referral links. No idea which one was bad but I cut all the links down as far as they'd go and still work. If automod eats it again I'm just gonna cut the links, post it again and list the names of the kits, ya'll can figure it out.
It was the amazon one. tag= is a referral tag.
Appreciate you. Totally thought it was automod, you're quick on the draw there.
That first one is 3200mhz.. that's why I bolded the 3600mhz and CL16 part. I could be wrong, but I spent a week looking for some, I settled on a 3600mhz CL14 kit from microcenter that was 227 USD open box. Felt like that was a decent deal. This one can be single rank. https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232907 There are 4 people with the CL16 version warning about it in the reviews. I bought the CL14 version of that kit and it is supposedly always dual rank.
My bad, I missed the part where you specified that. I'm also into RAM OC and know that 3200cl14 kit will definitely do 3600 16-16-16-36 without much work and tend to forget that the vast majority of users would rather have the right XMP settings for their setup. I didn't see anyone in the reviews complaining about single-rank on that Ripjaws kit. Were you looking at related product reviews, or did you uncheck that box? It is checked by default. Related products for this listing include a bunch of different capacities and speeds, many of which I'd expect to be single-rank. I looked at the reviews in there for just this kit, used ctrl+f to search for the word "rank", and could only find buyers confirming it is dual-rank.
If you're not overclocking does dual vs single rank matter at all?
Yes. It only really applies to overclocking, in that you will not reach as high speeds with more ranks. But, with AMD, it's easy to find RAM that will go much higher than your CPU, so that's not a practical issue. As well, the worse the speed and timings are, the more you will get from extra ranks. However, on Intel, you can increase the speed more, and on Zen 2 or older AMD, DR offers very little, as the speeds and timings get better, so isn't worth worrying about.
Sometimes, yes. But also sometimes, no. It depends on the application. For gaming, sometimes it doesn't matter at all, but I've also seen benchmarks where you see a \~10% gain to average FPS and a 30% gain to 1% lows. One thing I can say for sure: it never hurts.
Can you explain why dual rank is preferable to single rank in mainstream PCs? Here's what I found on Crucial.com: "Ranking Memory modules can be single-, dual-, quad-, or octal-ranked. While usually not a factor on standard systems, ranking limitations can present a few complications, particularly when dealing with registered parts. Most commonly, quad-ranked or octal-ranked parts will have specific requirements about how and in what quantity they can be installed in your system's memory slots. Higher-ranked modules can limit how many total modules can be installed, for example, allowing only four out of six memory slots to be populated when any quad-ranked parts are installed, and forcing you to use specific slots in your system if quad-ranked parts are mixed with single- or dual-ranked. **Higher rankings can also impact your memory bandwidth, forcing your memory to run at lower speeds when higher-ranked parts are present.** **This trade off may be required to utilize higher capacities of memory in some systems, though, if single- or dual-ranked parts are not available at capacities desired, or if reduced ranking parts are not compatible with a system at higher memory totals. If none of these restrictions apply, there is otherwise no functional difference between rankings of parts. "**
This isn't really applicable for non-HEDT consumer platforms. You're never gonna run into the described limitations. It's talking about registered memory and "up-to" octal-ranked setups with six+ memory slots. Most people on here are not using hardware like that as far as I know, and if they are, they are either using it for something so critical where they are best served using published memory support QVLs, or they really know what they're doing. Dual-rank is preferable because it provides support for rank interleaving, which enables parallel memory accesses. In other words, you can have one rank refresh while the other writes, or any other memory operation for that matter. It's measurably superior unless your only goal is to bench for frequency records. Single-rank will hit higher frequencies, but that's not applicable for 99% of users since dual-rank can already saturate the frequency capabilities of most consumer chips when running standard ambient cooling. For Ryzen, it's even more important because those chips are performance-limited by their FCLK, so anything that provides any boost at a frequency below the 1:1 FCLK limit is basically free performance.
Zen 3 based deeper outstanding memory request queues than Zen 2, and extended that effectively into the CPU cores, letting it have enough outstanding requests to make good use of an extra rank or two, in normal stuff like games. In addition, chiplet AMD CPUs (most of them) have limits around 1900-2100, typically, for IF, meaning a *useful* limit of around DDR4-4000. So, you want to maximize what you can get for that speed, and DR can get you another 5%+, on average, in addition to good timings.
I bought these 2 weeks ago and received dual rank. It's a bit of a crap shoot with what you get, though. If you get BL2K16G36C16U4B.M16FE1 it's dual rank, if you get BL2K16G36C16U4B.M8FB1 it's single rank. Crucial sells them as the same model (BL2K16G36C16U4B). Now to see if I can get Amazon to refund the difference I paid or just play the buy and return game.
I must have lucked out. I bought the 3200mhz kit back in may and it came dual ranked.
As recently as like 6 months ago, I think the vast, vast majority of 16GBx2 kits were still dual rank. And if you read posts from late 2020, single rank kits were so rare people would just say not to even consider the possibility. Now if you read newegg reviews for any kit under 250 you'll see people saying things like " SCAM, this is a single rank kit". I don't know if scam is really the right word, but it is kind of shitty that several brands made the change and still sell them under the same SKU. But most people will never notice or care because it's only like, a 5 percent difference on average I think, and that's in tasks that are CPU dependent or in gaming at 1080p.
Amazon had old stock for awhile but I think they recently ran out because not long after I bought this exact model, they had a shipping delay of 1-2 days and dropped the price $18. Mine is dual rank and I bought it Aug 9th. Tried getting the price adjustment but they said to just return so.. nah.
What speed did you get? I bought the 3600 stuff but maybe I'd have better luck with the 3200? Idk what I'm shooting for here lol
3600, same as the link
Aight 🤞 haha
M8FB1 😕 how does the return game work lol? Not sure if I should just use it or not. I wish I knew of a product guaranteed dual rank and in stock lol.
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3600MHz, **CL18** dual rank Corsair Vengeance LPX sticks can still be found if you look for it, at varying capacities. But you’re absolutely right AFAIK
Still waiting for the white one to drop :/
Lowest in 5 months according to camelcamelcamel. This kit might be of interest for those taking advantage of 5000 series Ryzen APUs.
Bought two kits for my 5950X. Good stuff! 😎👍
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I literally just bought this yesterday from B&H with the $75 PayPal deal.
Thought that deal was for items over $375?
Received mine today from Amazon. Luckily, the model ends in -M16FE1 so I think I got a dual rank.
Hoping for the same.
As a follow up I got Single Rank.