DDR5 just highly dislikes if you populate all four slots, and AMD AM5 especially so. Whatever RAM size you need, you want to reach it with two modules. Treat the board like it only had slots A2 and B2 (2nd and 4th from the left) and treat the other two as decoration, if you want any kind of decent speed.
DDR5-6000 with four modules currently has little chance of working on AM5, due to twice the stress on the memory system compared to two modules. Even with just two modules, DDR5-6400 is already about the limit from where it can become harder to make it work on AM5. So DDR5-6000 with four modules is best not even considered, that kind of thing may work on Intel Z790 + 14th gen CPU, where the CPU's memory controller is more advanced, but it could be challenging there too. On AM5 at the moment, i don't see how it could work, unless your CPU happens to have an exceptionally good IMC (integrated memory controller).
Also see
RAM explained: Why two modules are better than four / single- vs. dual-rank / stability testing.
What kind of speed did you get with four modules on the Asus X670E board, surely not the DDR5-6000 XMP?
Do you have any actual use for that much RAM? Because while such an amount of RAM can be necessary for professional applications, like rendering, video processing, lots of VMs, things of that nature, it will do absolutely nothing for gaming for example, most games don't even use more than 16 GB RAM. If you only want 128 GB because you think "more is better" (no offense, sometimes it is), but if you don't actually have any professional workloads that require it, you're only making things unnecessarily difficult and expensive, while providing zero benefit from that much RAM being available. So then i would stick to one kit of 2x 32 GB. That should work at XMP no problem.
top of the line MSI motherboard, i.e. the Godlike, attracted by some advertised features, including RAM support up to 256Gb
Gb would be Gigabit, but of course you mean GB. Thing is, that's not a feature of the GODLIKE, that's just something they added in a BIOS update, see here on the lowly PRO X670-P WIFI:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-X670-P-WIFI/support
and 2DPC 2R Max speed up to 5400+ MHz (it said 6000+ when I bought the motherboard)
The IMC is the main sticking point in the memory system here, not the board or the RAM itself. On AM5 this is actually the most pronounced, since the memory controller inside the CPU is worse than on Intel. Once you populate all four slots, the attainable DDR5 speed goes down the drain pretty much.
The following factors all affect if the RAM can actually run at a certain setting:
1) The mainboard model (PCB layer count, PCB trace optimization, RAM slot topology and slot count, component selection, RAM VRM etc.)
2) The mainboard's BIOS optimizations and the BIOS settings
3) The CPU's integrated memory controller (IMC), quality depends on the CPU generation as well as on the individual CPU (silicon lottery)
4) The properties of the RAM modules.
With 1) you got the best and then some, no doubt. But that's not the limiting factor on AM5. For 2) it's the same for all MSI boards with this chipset, as they all use the same codebase and AGESA. With 4), your RAM alone could do it, for example when only using two modules. So that leaves 3), this is the main reason why such configurations rarely work well on AM5. The memory controllers are less good than on Intel right now.
The board specs and QVL become more and more irrelevant in case of these two factors: Enthusiast-grade XMP speeds, or very challenging configurations like four big dual-rank modules. See the replies
here, they were mostly about the first factor, but it applies just the same to the challenging configuration. At this point the QVL becomes more of a marketing tool, not a guarantee that it will work. For the QVL, MSI work with CPUs binned for top-grade IMCs, most users' CPUs will not have such a capable IMC. So the QVL always represents the best-case scenario.
There is not a single 4x 32 GB DDR5 kit that is meant for AMD AM5 with an EXPO profile. There's one Corsair kit like this (without and with RGB), but it's meant for Intel,
https://www.corsair.com/us/en/p/mem...t-s-cl40-memory-kit-black-cmk128gx5m4b5600c40
If you can make do with 96 GB of RAM, get a kit of 2x 48 GB with an EXPO profile, for example:
Designed for DDR5-enabled AMD AM5 platforms, Flare X5 series DDR5 memory is built for high performance in a low-profile design. Featuring AMD EXPO overclocking profiles for easy memory overclocking, users can easily enable overclocked performance by simply enabling EXPO in the BIOS on compatible...
www.gskill.com
Buy Crucial Pro 96GB Kit (48GBx2) DDR5-5600 UDIMM CP2K48G56C46U5. FREE US Delivery, guaranteed 100% compatibility when ordering using our online tools.
www.crucial.com
This has the best chance of actually running at DDR5-5600.
and secondly the presence of three M.2 slots totally independent (i.e., unaffected by the presence of other peripherals-at least on paper)
X670E GAMING PLUS WIFI:
PRO X670-P WIFI:
MAG X670E TOMAHAWK WIFI:
MPG X670E CARBON WIFI:
MEG X670E ACE:
I've been
critical of the GODLIKE boards (since a few generations), their value-for-money is pretty bad to say the least. The maximum i'd ever recommend is the ACE, but if there's a UNIFY-X available with only two DIMM slots, that would actually be the best. Since most people should just stick to using two DDR5 modules anyway, and having only two DIMM slots results in superior signal quality over four slots with two empty ones. Sadly those two-DIMM-slot boards have become rare, even though four modules tend to run quite badly.
Coming to the weaker M.2 PCIe SSD benchmark scores on the MSI board. I'm of the opinion that you should try to rectify the RAM situation first, or at least benchmark the SSDs while using only two modules in slots A2 and B2 and thus at XMP speed. Because everything you do on the system has to go through the RAM first. DDR5 depends on higher speeds to really get going, because it has to compensate for its higher latencies compared to DDR4. This means that DDR5-4000 performs considerably worse than DDR4-3600 for example, so it becomes a bottleneck. You want to run DDR5-5200 or -5600 even for challenging configurations. To me, DDR5-4800 is the absolute minimum i would accept for a highly challenging configuration such as yours. Anything lower and you will have to change something, maybe go to 2x 48 GB if you require that much RAM.
Generally, i'm not sure what RAM speeds you managed on the ASUS, but it seems like it was a bit higher, so maye it's something about the MSI BIOS after all which prevents this configuration from going at least to DDR5-4800 or so. But going high into the DDR5-5xxx range or even up to XMP, i highly doubt that this was possible on the ASUS either. But yeah, i agree, the GODLIKE wasn't the best purchase for several reasons. Especially not when you're doing a sidegrade from the same platform on ASUS, that's just a waste of money at that point.
You could open a
ticket with MSI about your issues, maybe they will ask you to try something about the RAM situation (but usually you can't force it to perform very well when it won't even go above DDR5-4000 now), and that would then perhaps also make the SSDs work better. But yeah, try that with just two RAM modules, curious if the scores improve.
