Just an academic question really, for the same money, is it better to have faster RAM or RAM with a lower latency? Conventional wisdom would say raw speed is more important buy everything I've read seems to indicate that timings are more important (at least in games). Was just wondering if I was alone in thinking that. I suppose faster RAM gives more overclocking headroom but surely you can simply change the ratio?
Higher frequencies are all important with DDR 3, whereas DDR 2 is a bit more half and half. I suppose with DDR 2, as the frequency is much lower in comparison those latencies get amplified in significance somewhat.
hands down speed. not since the days of DDR and AMD skt 754,939 have lower latencies made a real impact on performance. core i7 benefits from higher speed because you should in theory be able to achieve a higher uncore frequency by using the general rule of thumb x2 RAM speed +1 multiplier uncore frequency has a real impact on performance although no way as much as CPU but still to coin the phrase "every little counts"
hummm... questionable no? http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/memory/2009/11/02/intel-lynnfield-memory-performance-analysis/1 http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/memory-scaling-i7,review-31600-9.html Seems marginal at best and for the same price, speed costs more than latency.
In the original DDR era, it was timings. DDR2, leant a bit more towards frequency, but timings were still very important. In the DDR3 era we're in now, timings are pretty much unimportant unless you want your benchmark tests to look flash. In practical situations, frequency is far more important.
I know everyone says that but why? I've never seen any justification for it and according to Tom's Hardware on memory for the i7: "The results are obvious: going from one memory speed to the next, e.g. from DDR3-1066 to 1333, does not provide major benefits." Bit-tech on Lynnfield: "buying high performance memory offers questionable appeal. From the results we can conclude that only multi-tasking and file compression show the only notable performance advantage for high performance memory, and then only with latency reduction not frequency increments." So why is frequency deemed to important? Someone must have an answer or is it just a myth by memory companies?
freq for i7 isnt really an issue because they have such large amounts of bandwidth anyway that only a few apps really make use of it. However an indirect result of having higher freq RAM is that you can have a higher Uncore freq and this does impact on general performance. there was a thread on the old custom PC site about it that me and another guy were discussing. general rule of thumb is uncore freq = 2x RAM freq +1 multi. its been documented that this seems to be the most stable and that the ratio between RAM and uncore should be greater than 1:2 for maximum stablity but higher results have been to be stable such as RAM x2 +2, +3 etc. ALSO higher freq RAM offers greater overclocking potential. dont think you will be hitting 4Gz+ on DDR1066 or 1333 depending on the multi option in your bios
Memory Capacity > Memory Frequency > Memory Latency If I were you'd I'd worry about getting the cheapest memory that will do what you want it to do, leave the 'specialised, low latency, high frequency, revolutionary Dual Path Heat Xchage' to the overclocking canucks
