I've been looking to upgrade to ddr3 and a core-i5 750 build from my aging athlon x2 II 240 system. When I first built my pc I just thought that the more gigs you had the better your system would be. But after being on these forums and overclocking a bit I've come to realize this is not the case. So how do I shop for RAM? Do I look for the lowest and tightest timings? ie. 7-7-7-24 or 6-8-6-24? What is better: CAS 6 or CAS 8 latency. I've scoured the internet and haven't really understood what the deal is. If you could recommend some reliable RAM from newegg that is in the 4gb 1600mhz or higher range that would also help. I'm looking for RAM that won't hinder my overclocking capabilities of the i5 or mobo. Thanks in advance.
lower latency is better, i think 1333Mhz cl7 is faster than 1600Mhz cl9, but its not much difference tbh, although i doubt you would notice a difference, ddr3 ram is fast enough for almost anything atm. If i was you i would get 1600MHz ram cause its only a couple of quid more than 1333MHz and means when overclocking the i5 you shouldn't have to overclock the ram to get it to a good speed. i.e: if you overclocked the i5 to 4GHz (20 x 200MHz) you could have the ram at 1600MHz, whereas 1333MHz would have to be at 1200MHz which is a bit slow.
Wrong, speed always has more of a impact than timings. Its why BT always suggests 1600MHz over 1333MHz. If you look at the PC3 numbers, this is the amount of Mb/s it can transfer. 1600 = 12800, so 12.8Gb/s 1333 = 10666, so 10.6Gb/s As you can see from above the difference is 2.2Gb/s, nearly the speed of SATA 3.0Gb/s (SATA 2) Timings do play a apart, but rule of thumb is higher speed lower timings. Hope this helps
It seems at the moment that the faster ram gets, the looser the timings are getting, now unless you're going for absolute overclocking madness, it's not really worth worrying about to much. What you want is good reliable, fast, stable ram, have a look at whats recommended in the bit-tech write ups and you won't go wrong.
awesome. that cleared up a lot of my confusion. so the lower the numbers the better and higher frequencies. thanks!
but high speed + low timings = very expensive, only for pro benchmarkers where another couple of point matter...
Just though I'd explain timings slightly more. The numbers are how fast sections of the RAM are refreshed, rated in ms (mili seconds), so a rating fo 9 means it gets refreshed ever 9ms, while a rating of 5 means 5ms, ect. Hence why dropping from 9 to 7 has little effect. I don't know what the different sections are though, it's on my 'to learn' list Edit: saying that, the numbers could refer to passes. I'll have to check...
