Haswell Benchmarks Show that High Speed RAM gives Performance Boost in Gaming

[TOMPPIX]

Apparently, there is a general consensus among gamers that RAM above 1600Mhz does not really offer any significant performance boost. Corsair disagrees, and has answered by publishing these benchmarks. The benches were provided to us by Swedish site Sweclockers.com. Now these are very interesting benches. As you may recall, Kaveri APUs are significantly affected by the use of high quality RAM. Infact AMD has started releasing their own Radeon Gaming RAM rated at 2400 Mhz for this purpose alone. The same RAM would infact work  wonders on Haswell here as well, as the benchmarks will show you.

 

 

 

 

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[Lays]

Sc2 is heavily CPU reliant isn't it? it would only make sense to benefit from a cpu heavy game with faster ram.

 

But it is interesting.   

 

 

 

Also one thing to take into consideration is, corsair is a memory company, they benefit quite a bit from people buying faster ram.

[antoainb]

If corsair agrees with it so much why not make fastest RAM less expensive?

[The_Strict_Nein]

The fact of the matter is, for the price of going from 1600MHz RAM to 2400MHz for a 10% boost, you could save a bit longer an SLI/Crossfire your card (obviously not that case if you a Titan for example, but anything GTX770 or below) which is a massive performance difference. No thank you.

[LIGISTX]

I agree, it is a largely CPU bound game. But still, if you play CPU bound games, its good to know! Too bad RAM is so expensive these days with the production facility fire and all.

[wpirobotbuilder]

There's a lot of hate going on about this.

 

It will depend on the application you're using, and on the rest of your system. If your system is GPU bound in a game, faster RAM will likely do nothing. If your CPU is the bottleneck, faster RAM could make a difference.

 

It will depend on how the game accesses memory, whether it does it in random chunks or if it grabs lots of data at once (which will benefit from the increased frequency). It will depend on whether your CPU bound scenario is due to the CPU waiting around for information from memory or whether it's performing an intensive computation in-place.

 

It isn't the be-all and end-all of more performance, but it can have tangible benefits.

[nickpc]

Sc2 is heavily CPU reliant isn't it? it would only make sense to benefit from a cpu heavy game with faster ram.

 

But it is interesting.   

 

 

 

Also one thing to take into consideration is, corsair is a memory company, they benefit quite a bit from people buying faster ram.

lol your pic

[LIGISTX]

The fact of the matter is, for the price of going from 1600MHz RAM to 2400MHz for a 10% boost, you could save a bit longer an SLI/Crossfire your card (obviously not that case if you a Titan for example, but anything GTX770 or below) which is a massive performance difference. No thank you.

 

But a lot of the time 1866 is only a few bucks more than 1600, 5% FPS gain isn't bad for a few bucks!

[Guest GRRigger]

But a lot of the time 1866 is only a few bucks more than 1600, 5% FPS gain isn't bad for a few bucks!

so 1866 sweet spot?

in most games, even if you have 1333 cl9 8gb stick, it doesnt matter much.

[The_Strict_Nein]

But a lot of the time 1866 is only a few bucks more than 1600, 5% FPS gain isn't bad for a few bucks!

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of 1866 as a new standard (especially with APUs and the like, and that fact that Dominator Platinum 2x4GB 1866 kits are cheaper than 1600 kits in the UK) but telling people who are just learning about computers that 2400MHz is worthwhile is a massive lie.

[brownninja97]

didnt we work this out a while back.

[deathjester]

so 1866 sweet spot?

in most games, even if you have 1333 cl9 8gb stick, it doesnt matter much.

 

I saw like a 1fps gain going from 1600 9 9 9 24 to 1866 9-10-9-24 t1, in the most CPU bound game I can think of (Guild Wars 2).

 

It isn't huge. Almost all 1600 1.5v 9-9-9-24 will oc to that, and most do it at stock voltage. 1866 cl9 to 2133 cl10 I saw much less of a gain.

 

You also have to remember that when the only games you are seeing a big swing on is NON 8 thread games that are cpu bound? The study is kind of rigged. Add to that low level OpenGL/DirectX are coming which will make this even less of an issue.

 

Non gaming ? Yeah it matters, my cinebench scores went up quite a bit. Gaming? Not a whole hell of a lot. Linus's video on ram was correct. 

 

There is a reason they picked Star Craft 2. 

 

Any decent brand like Gskill, Corsair, Kingston will OC to 1866. 2133? I wouldn't bother with unless it is CL9. Some 1866 will OC to that and some won't and you are using higher end voltage to do it like 1.65 most of the time. On Haswell? Yeah it's fine. On other series? Lot of debate on that. 2400 with higher latency or 2133 cl11 etc? Is going to be slower in a lot of games. 

 

It will kick butt rendering though.

[JAKEBAB]

ram is still to expensive to care i bought my 1866mhz 2x8gb kit for $109 Aud the same kit is now $200+ its ridiculous!

[Wiflare]

Anything faster than 1600 makes virtually no difference in gaming applications on haswell, if paired with a decent gpu.
We don't know the system specs, for all we know they could have been using the integrated gpu.

[Guest GRRigger]

-snip-

yup, the only really intensive stuff that they could use in game, that would require fast ram with cpu is only physics probably. we will see when new game engines come out.

allso there was bf4 benchmark... you remember? i think it benefited from faster ram. i dont remember numbers tho it may be only 1 or 2 fps idk

[TheGosuStandard]

I have a 4770k with my 1866 set to 1333 default for some reason, should I boost it to 1866?

[4960X]

Can't wait for DDR4 to get here!

[deathjester]

I have a 4770k with my 1866 set to 1333 default for some reason, should I boost it to 1866?

 

Go to overclock profile in bios. Hit Enable XMP. Save and restart. You now have the ram you paid for. If that doesn't work, post the ram you have, we can find the settings, punch em in and you will be good to go.

[ijKs Snow]

I have a 4770k with my 1866 set to 1333 default for some reason, should I boost it to 1866?

There is no reason to downclock a ram module unless you are having stability issues or voltage/timing issues.

[TheGosuStandard]

There is no reason to downclock a ram module unless you are having stability issues or voltage/timing issues.

I didn't do it, it's default (Not sure why it started that low for haswell), anyways going to do what the above person said.

[deathjester]

yup, the only really intensive stuff that they could use in game, that would require fast ram with cpu is only physics probably. we will see when new game engines come out.

allso there was bf4 benchmark... you remember? i think it benefited from faster ram. i dont remember numbers tho it may be only 1 or 2 fps idk

 

Yeah. Anandtech did the best test I have seen. Corsair just puts out a test every few months to sell "premium ram". 

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell/7

 

Basically for GAMING? On a dedicated GPU, most games it doesn't matter and is so close the results don't even make sense at times. You could almost chalk it up to being random. 

 

Linus did a video on this as well (I mentioned before) here is the link. From what I have seen 2133 CL9>1866 cl9>1600 cl9 and who cares about everything else. Overpriced or for non gaming and good 2133 is usually overpriced or running voltage people might not be comfortable outside of Haswell. Anything past 2400? Might ruin OC on Haswell and Haswell is about the only platform that can do that consistently and keep it's oc. CPU OC> Ram OC 100 times over.

 

[BrightCandle]

Its always been the case that some applications benefit from faster RAM speeds. Another game that benefits in a similar way to SC2 is Arma 3. Its also very CPU dependent for its performance and tests done by BIS forum members show some reasonable scaling with RAM speed.

 

Typically buying faster RAM is a poor way to add performance. Doubling the price of your RAM for 10% when your not running the top CPU isn't worth it, but once you hit the maximum CPU and SLI then RAM is one of those things its not worth skimping on because it will be limiting in some applications and games. I am always reminded that a machine is always about some balance, choosing appropriately matched CPUs/GPUs/RAM etc usually results in the best overall performance for a given price point.

[Alex780]

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/123879-haswell-real-world-performance-ddr3-1600-is-not-enough/page-3#entry1652502

Already posted

[Grave]

Not worth it. Everyone knew it can give a little bit of a performance increase in some games but it's not enough to swap out your 1333/1600mhz RAM, let alone toss that much more money out for 2400mhz RAM. Some people might want or need the extra 10FPS but there's one serious problem about this news article and the benchmark article on that swedish website (WCCFTech rant incoming):

There's no conditions information. No hardware specs, no in-game settings specs, and no real inclination that this wasn't done with the Haswell iGPU at the lowest possible settings. Put it at max, play 4v4 Starcraft 2 and put a handful more games besides fucking Tomb Raider and Farcry 3 on the bench list.

Why people read, give clicks to or even mention WCCFTech truly baffles me. Please, for the love of factual news, stop reading that damn website. I've yet to see something that isn't wrong or pure speculation being posted here and I feel like it should be an auto-deletion of your post if you're linking a "news article" from there. Might even mention this to some of the board moderators..

[TOMPPIX]

Not worth it. Everyone knew it can give a little bit of a performance increase in some games but it's not enough to swap out your 1333/1600mhz RAM, let alone toss that much more money out for 2400mhz RAM. Some people might want or need the extra 10FPS but there's one serious problem about this news article and the benchmark article on that swedish website (WCCFTech rant incoming):

There's no conditions information. No hardware specs, no in-game settings specs, and no real inclination that this wasn't done with the Haswell iGPU at the lowest possible settings. Put it at max, play 4v4 Starcraft 2 and put a handful more games besides fucking Tomb Raider and Farcry 3 on the bench list.

Why people read, give clicks to or even mention WCCFTech truly baffles me. Please, for the love of factual news, stop reading that damn website. I've yet to see something that isn't wrong or pure speculation being posted here and I feel like it should be an auto-deletion of your post if you're linking a "news article" from there. Might even mention this to some of the board moderators..

 

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