RAM Speed and Latency - Can it Improve Performance?

[Nocmj1]

Hi everyone,

 

To preface this post, I have never bothered to look beyond capacity and memory technology type for RAM, so apologies in advance for the ignorance!

 

Having just built my first system in a while and tried my hand with overclocking the CPU and GPU for the first time, I i started watching videos about RAM tweaking. 

 

I have paired a Ryzen 5 3600 with 2 x 8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 RAM at 3600 MHz. The RAM has a latency of 18-22-22-42.

 

Why did I choose 3600 MHz? Because I simply assumed that faster speed = better performance. I know that to an extent this is true, but I've started watching videos about people tweaking these timings and seeing some good results. 

 

I've gone in and enabled the pre-configured DOCP profile in the BIOS to ensure that the RAM is running at its stated speed, but haven't gone any deeper into the BIOS than this.

 

The guides I've read have my head spinning a bit! My question is, does tweaking the timings (and other more detailed RAM BIOS settings) lead to observable increases in performance? Or will they be so small that I won't even notice?

 

Thanks!

[manikyath]

memory timings i have no idea how much they'll visibly imprive things on a day to day computing experience.. but for the memory clock speed, it's best you dont go past 3600, because infinity fabric runs at RAM speed up until 1800MHz (hurr hurr DDR clock speed is half of the number on the box), and infinity fabric will halve when you go past that ==> a huge hit on performance.

[Nocmj1]

10 minutes ago, manikyath said:

memory timings i have no idea how much they'll visibly imprive things on a day to day computing experience.. but for the memory clock speed, it's best you dont go past 3600, because infinity fabric runs at RAM speed up until 1800MHz (hurr hurr DDR clock speed is half of the number on the box), and infinity fabric will halve when you go past that ==> a huge hit on performance.

Thanks for that - I just watched a Linus video from a while back explaining exactly this.

[Shoopman]

I have seen a noticeable difference in performance (better than overclocking the CPU or GPU) by running my RAM at 3400 vs the default of 2133. However, my system is incredibly unbalanced and my GPU is very CPU bottlenecked.

 

I can't speak for your system, but RAM speed definitely matters much more than it did a few years ago. Will it matter that you are running at 3600 instead of the "baseline" of 3200? Probably not much, but it can't hurt.

[xg32]

1 hour ago, Nocmj1 said:

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Most of the improvement you'll see is going from 2x8 to 4x8, mostly in fps games or games that like memory bandwidth/lower latency like SOTTR hitman and total wars.

 

These are just estmates, but single rank to dual rank is about a 5-7% diff

going from cl18 to cl14 3600 is about a 3-5% diff

going from 3600 to 4000 is ~1% diff

 

It's usually only worth it for the very top gpus in gaming (3080/90/6900xt)

 

But if you can oc existing ram as long as it's stable, free performance.

[Stockholmes]

48 minutes ago, xg32 said:

Most of the improvement you'll see is going from 2x8 to 4x8, mostly in fps games or games that like memory bandwidth/lower latency like SOTTR hitman and total wars.

 

These are just estmates, but single rank to dual rank is about a 5-7% diff

going from cl18 to cl14 3600 is about a 3-5% diff

going from 3600 to 4000 is ~1% diff

 

It's usually only worth it for the very top gpus in gaming (3080/90/6900xt)

 

But if you can oc existing ram as long as it's stable, free performance.

I think everything else is on point but going from single channel to dual channel could be as much as 20% faster.

[xg32]

12 minutes ago, Stockholmes said:

I think everything else is on point but going from single channel to dual channel could be as much as 20% faster.

gotta set expectations low but on high fps high bandwidth is possible, i don't wanna throw best case scenarios around to waste his money lol

[Cheburek]

On 3/1/2021 at 2:18 AM, Stockholmes said:

I think everything else is on point but going from single channel to dual channel could be as much as 20% faster.

Rank/=/channell

He didnt mean dual channell

 

[Stockholmes]

2 hours ago, Cheburek said:

Rank/=/channell

He didnt mean dual channell

 

Ah I see, I understood wrong then