Ram Timings

Comments

• Iselin Member LegendaryPosts: 18,719

  July 2013

  The difference will be in the range of "barely visible" to "negligible" and then only in specific benchmarks. Totally irrelevant in day to day use.

  Having said that, if money is no object, the ram with the better timing is typically the hand-picked "best of the litter" often from the same batch of chips. That's not to say that the cheaper ones were also tested and failed the better timings: they may or may not have been and you could get lucky and achieve the tighter timing with those also. But the more expensive ones were tested and passed the tighter timing.

  And you thought you were asking an easy question

   

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• Asm0deus Member EpicPosts: 4,622

  July 2013

   I am mostly interested in if I will see the difference, if I will only see it in benchmarks and theoretically rather than practically I am inclined to go with the less expensive ones.

   

  I mean if some one told me it would make a noticeable difference in gaming I may spend the extra but it sounds like it won't.  It's quite interesting that they are the same and just have been tested and passed for the lower rating.

   

  Thnx for the reply.

   

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• Ridelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

  July 2013

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  Originally posted by Iselin
  The difference will be in the range of "barely visible" to "negligible" and then only in specific benchmarks. Totally irrelevant in day to day use.

  Having said that, if money is no object, the ram with the better timing is typically the hand-picked "best of the litter" often from the same batch of chips. That's not to say that the cheaper ones were also tested and failed the better timings: they may or may not have been and you could get lucky and achieve the tighter timing with those also. But the more expensive ones were tested and passed the tighter timing.

  And you thought you were asking an easy question

   

  ---

  +1

  Will see a difference in RAM-specific benchmarks or very memory intensive operations (RAR), won't be able to tell between any of this and run-of-the-mill DDR3 1333 9-9-9 in gaming.

  http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/memory-performance-16gb-ddr31333-to-ddr32400-on-ivy-bridge-igp-with-gskill/14

  Decent summary - they recommend going with faster RAM, but only if it doesn't break the bank, and you are certain to use the XMP memory profiles to get the faster timings (most people just plug them in and they run at some low default speed anyway and never notice - it makes that little of a difference). They tested pretty much everything from base 1333 to 2400 - going in price points of base up to double. Double the cost clearly wasn't worth it, but an extra $10-15 they thought was worth the extra cost.
  
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,533

  July 2013

  It's not worth buying extra fast memory unless you need to feed integrated graphics from it or are running some special software that is exceptionally memory bandwidth limited.

  It's important to remember that memory latency timings are in numbers of clock cycles, so 1600 MHz CAS 9 is the same real-world latency (in nanoseconds) as 1066 MHz CAS 6 or 2133 MHz CAS 12.  If you want to pay more for extra fast memory, higher clock speeds usually offer more bang for the buck.