Splitting hairs on RAM timing?

[Hamothy]

I'm looking at two different types of G.Skill RAM, one of which is 3200 MHz and the other 3600 MHz. They're both listed as having a CL of 16, but the timings on the 3200 are 16-18-18-38 and the 3600 are 16-19-19-39. Are the timing differences negligible enough to make the 3600 the better choice? (The 3600 is about $15 more.)

[Sorenson]

I wouldn’t stress about the sub timings and go with the faster 3600mhz memory as long as it wasn’t stretching your budget. 

[porina]

The timings are given in number of cycles. If converted to time, the 3600 is shorter latency.

[xg32]

depending on the pricing, 16-18-18 3200 is straight up just bottom bin, would not buy barring a huge discount, 16-19-19 is "ok"

 

the best deal atm imho is https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-16gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232306?Item=N82E16820232306

 

it's better than the 16-19-19 for 10usd more and used to be 200+ usd a year or 2 ago.

 

Although even if u go into bios and fine tune the timings, it's only about a 3-5% improvement for a 35~usd diff on heavy loads, more for amd, whether or not that's worth is up to u.

 

There's also this: https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-16gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232892?&quicklink=true but it could just be a voltage bump for cl14

[Windows7ge]

CL or the CAS Latency has the greatest impact. With it being identical the other values being +1 won't have as profound an impact to the overall speed. The 3600MHz kit would be the faster of the two assuming your CPU/motherboard can handle it.

 

Of course you could go with the 3200MHz kit and tighten the timing lower than stock. This would yield similar performance.