Difference Between 3600mhz CL18 vs 3600mhz CL16 for Gaming on Ryzen

[weedydeedy]

How much performance am I really losing out on for gaming if I'm using 3600 CL18 vs 3600 CL16 with a Ryzen system? Is it worth paying the 10-30 dollars more for the CL16?

[Cool_Evlo]

4 minutes ago, weedydeedy said:

How much performance am I really losing out on for gaming if I'm using 3600 CL18 vs 3600 CL16 with a Ryzen system? Is it worth paying the 10-30 dollars more for the CL16?

I have heard that lower cas-latency will make it feel more "snappy" (Like when you click something it will open faster.)

[Quickstrike]

1 minute ago, weedydeedy said:

How much performance am I really losing out on for gaming if I'm using 3600 CL18 vs 3600 CL16 with a Ryzen system? Is it worth paying the 10-30 dollars more for the CL16?

From my understanding of CL (and I could be completely wrong here, in which case feel free to educate me), you are loosing around 12% "Reaction time". 

If the ram task is a race, the CL 16 the "car" react and starts racing 2 cycle faster. So on smaller task, it's add up but it's not as remarkable as going up in Mhz.

[Fasauceome]

Lower latency on ryzen often reuslts in better 1% and .1% lows, but it improves general performance too, so you would also see an increase to average frame rate and overall "smoothness" in a lot of ways.

 

CL18 3600 has the same latency as CL16 3200, and people often conclude that performance is just fine on 3200 CL16, even if lower latency is slightly better.

 

If the price difference is small, and the peace of mind from better performance (even if it's slight) is worth it, then go for it. But there generally isn't much of a drawback from opting for the CL18 kit.

 

Side note: if you get the ram and your system won't run at 3600MHz (for any number of reasons) you might end up manually tuning it and get the best of both worlds. My girlfriend's 2200G can't run the advertised 3600 speed of her memory, but I manually tuned it to 3466 and dropped the CL by a ton, so she has high bandwidth and low latency which delivers quite good performance.