Have any of you ever seen this?

[emosun]

In the case of needing to improve a computers speed , I've seen computers with.....

 

slow cpus

slow gpus

not enough memory

slow drives

slow bus speeds like usb 2.0

almost any kind of bottleneck

But I dont think I ever in my entire life have seen a computer who's problem was due to slow memory. As in .... slow memory speed and faster memory solving the slowdown issue.

I think it has to do with the fact that ram speed only effects the amount of time it takes to load something in be it all at once or during a program. and the difference on any respective board between it's slowest supported memory and fastest support memory isn't great enough to actually notice the rams speed in actual usage. Furthermore the previously mentioned slowdown areas that usually bottleneck long before the ram speed ever is an issue.

So it begs the question , when i shop for computer parts , is there any reason to ever buy faster ram? Because I cannot think of any reason at all I would need it over cheaper slower ram.

 

[Corrupt_Liberty]

2 minutes ago, emosun said:

In the case of needing to improve a computers speed , I've seen computers with.....

 

slow cpus

slow gpus

not enough memory

slow drives

slow bus speeds like usb 2.0

almost any kind of bottleneck

But I dont think I ever in my entire life have seen a computer who's problem was due to slow memory. As in .... slow memory speed and faster memory solving the slowdown issue.

I think it has to do with the fact that ram speed only effects the amount of time it takes to load something in be it all at once or during a program. and the difference on any respective board between it's slowest supported memory and fastest support memory isn't great enough to actually notice the rams speed in actual usage. Furthermore the previously mentioned slowdown areas that usually bottleneck long before the ram speed ever is an issue.

So it begs the question , when i shop for computer parts , is there any reason to ever buy faster ram? Because I cannot think of any reason at all I would need it over cheaper slower ram.

 

Ryzen CPU's tend to like faster RAM and perform better with it.  Other than that, save your pennies and get something cheaper.  

[Dedayog]

It's been shown that faster RAM improves fps by a small amount, whether that's something you find to be worth it... but it does improve things a tad.

[rice guru]

4 minutes ago, emosun said:

In the case of needing to improve a computers speed , I've seen computers with.....

 

slow cpus

slow gpus

not enough memory

slow drives

slow bus speeds like usb 2.0

almost any kind of bottleneck

But I dont think I ever in my entire life have seen a computer who's problem was due to slow memory. As in .... slow memory speed and faster memory solving the slowdown issue.

I think it has to do with the fact that ram speed only effects the amount of time it takes to load something in be it all at once or during a program. and the difference on any respective board between it's slowest supported memory and fastest support memory isn't great enough to actually notice the rams speed in actual usage. Furthermore the previously mentioned slowdown areas that usually bottleneck long before the ram speed ever is an issue.

So it begs the question , when i shop for computer parts , is there any reason to ever buy faster ram? Because I cannot think of any reason at all I would need it over cheaper slower ram.

 

If you are buying ryzen especially the latest generation buying faster ram is recommended to take advantage of infinity fabric

[Princess Luna]

People would be mistaken to think Ryzen is the only applicable case.

 

Memory matters a lot even on Intel and for a long time now, it's just not as wide spread as it should be and many have that belief that memory frequency doesn't matter on Intel which is wrong.

 

Using old benchmarks from the early DDR3 days you'd be hard pressed to find meaningful differences yes... but nowadays the reality is very different:

 

We were able to verify a huge performance boost with memory alone in here, as you can see going from 2133mhz CL15 to 3466mhz CL16 on an Intel i5 6400 4c/4t processor already gave us 16,2% higher averages and an insane 49,4% improvements on 1% Lows meaning a much smoother gameplay experience.

 

So be not mistaken, dual channel + high frequency and tight timings it matters and it can be a true bottleneck even if you can't see it as easily.

[minibois]

Have I ever seen ...

Lower performance (fps) than expected in a system: yes

Actual issues because slower memory: also yes.

 

The first is easy to find online. I particularly like GamersNexus' memory frequency benchmark.

The latter is something I experienced myself. I run a Ryzen 7 1700 (and Ryzen loves fast memory as everyone says). I was playing Skyrim, as I often did and the game just did not feel right. Stutters all over the place. Then I realized my BIOS had reset itself, thus the memory was running at 2133Mhz (rather than the 2933Mhz I had stable at the time). 

I did a bit of testing and couldn't find a large difference in average fps, or even minimum. Thinking about it now, it was probably an inconsistent frametime issue.. 

 

So yes, (IMO) faster memory is definitely worth it! (especially since it's often only a +10% increase in price to go from 2133Mhz to 3000Mhz).

[emosun]

11 minutes ago, Princess Luna said:

So be not mistaken, dual channel + high frequency and tight timings it matters and it can be a true bottleneck even if you can't see it as easily.

im not seeing 82 fps as being slow , perhaps I'm just able to play games better than others who need faster computers to do the same job. Or more likely..... some need a graph to actually notice the difference in ram speed

[Dedayog]

5 minutes ago, emosun said:

im not seeing 82 fps as being slow , perhaps I'm just able to play games better than others who need faster computers to do the same job. Or more likely..... some need a graph to actually notice the difference in ram speed

Rofl!  yes, you're just better than everyone  

82 fps isn't slow, but faster RAM will give higher fps, it's been proven.  If you don't need it, don't buy it. 

[emosun]

6 minutes ago, jstudrawa said:

but faster RAM will give higher fps, it's been proven.

provided they are running an application that requires it , and somehow need more fps than the display can show , however

36 minutes ago, emosun said:

I cannot think of any reason at all I would need it

i don't play skyrim so so far the answer is simply no

[RejZoR]

Laptops capable of dual channel configuration shipping with 1 stick of RAM. That was the most common memory related fuckup.

[porina]

1 hour ago, emosun said:

So it begs the question , when i shop for computer parts , is there any reason to ever buy faster ram? Because I cannot think of any reason at all I would need it over cheaper slower ram.

It always depends on the user's use case. An interest area of mine is looking for large prime numbers using software similar to Prime95. If the size of the task can't fit in the CPU's L2/L3 cache, you very quickly hit ram bandwidth constraints. As a rule of thumb, you need at least one channel per core running at comparable speeds to not be ram bottlenecked. Basically as core counts go up without a corresponding increase in ram bandwidth, you are heavily ram bandwidth limited. Zen 2 kinda works around it by having a much bigger cache than previously, so this is more an Intel thing right now.

 

7 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Laptops capable of dual channel configuration shipping with 1 stick of RAM. That was the most common memory related fuckup.

Especially if using iGPU/APU which use system ram. They're also ram bandwidth limited.

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, minibois said:

Thinking about it now, it was probably an inconsistent frametime issue.. 

People always forget about those darned frametimes. Games are quite playable even at low FPS with solid frametimes. I ran Assassin's Creed Odyssey on my X58 rig at 30-45fps and it was smooth because the frametimes were very, very consistent. That was running an X5670 at 4.54Ghz and 24GB triple channel DDR3 at about 2100Mhz CL10. Sadly I never tested without the RAM OC so I can't say if that helped with keeping the frametimes stable. There's plenty of benchmarks showing it helps with fps in some titles, but I haven't seen anyone test how smoothly the games run (which, if you're already pushing over the refresh rate of your monitor, is the most important stat). 

[RejZoR]

@porina

Yeah, iGPU's and in general laptops always had bottlenecks all around because of power saving. And every such small bottleneck that would be tiny on desktop contributed way more in a laptop. Now imagine underfed CPU, single channel memory and a garbage 5400 RPM HDD. No wonder laptops were shit till now where CPU's are finally properly capable, they are actually shipping in dual channel (I have a relatively average Ryzen 2500U laptop from HP and it has 8GB of DC RAM. And of course SSD's. Had them since shitty Atom N270 netbooks and they make a HUGE difference. But still, cutting out DC causes quite a dip since almost all run iGPU unless you're with stand alone GPU in it.

 

[Animal901]

23 hours ago, jstudrawa said:

It's been shown that faster RAM improves fps by a small amount, whether that's something you find to be worth it... but it does improve things a tad.

15 percent improvement is not worth even 100 dollars. 

[Dedayog]

Just now, Animal901 said:

15 percent improvement is not worth even 100 dollars. 

15% faster RAM is $100 more?  Where are you pricing these?

[Animal901]

5 minutes ago, jstudrawa said:

15% faster RAM is $100 more?  Where are you pricing these?

Google, ebay, and new egg. If any of you get the speed of ram, and amount that linus intends to make you drool over then you'll be spending more... i get it.. you just buy 1 stick a month and pretend like you didn't do that spending when the next month rolls around. 3200mhz is the sweet spot right now anyways.

[Kilrah]

22 hours ago, Tegos said:

My personal rig originally had only 6GB of ram (4gb + 2gb). It was extremely prone to slowdowns, especially if I had a browser open along with something like an IDE (which is common because I do a lot of coding assignments for college).

Nope, what you were seeing had nothing to do with ram speed, just not enough of it. Swapping is orders of magnitude slower than RAM, and that's when it becomes noticeable.

[Dedayog]

14 minutes ago, Animal901 said:

Google, ebay, and new egg. If any of you get the speed of ram, and amount that linus intends to make you drool over then you'll be spending more... i get it.. you just buy 1 stick a month and pretend like you didn't do that spending when the next month rolls around. 3200mhz is the sweet spot right now anyways.

Oh, I think we were comparing the 2133/2400 vs 3200 type anyway, which are very close in price mostly.

[Animal901]

5 minutes ago, jstudrawa said:

Oh, I think we were comparing the 2133/2400 vs 3200 type anyway, which are very close in price mostly.

I'm still using 16gb 1600mhz corsair vengence pro. Plays csgo just fine.  My monitor is whats slow....

[Dedayog]

4 minutes ago, Animal901 said:

I'm still using 16gb 1600mhz corsair vengence pro. Plays csgo just fine.  My monitor is whats slow....

Oh well you can't use DDR4 anyway, so kind of moot.

 

Now monitors...  looking to upgrade soon?  I think someone (maybe Walmart?) just released their black Friday deals.