Why does RAM's clock speed doesn't matter, and processor's does?

[Haswellx86]

Overclocking your processor is really popular, and has its performance benefits, but as Linus in one of his videos, he proved that RAM speed over 2666 MHz has very less effect on performance. Why is that so?

[BrushyLTT]

8 minutes ago, RTXboy123 said:

Overclocking your processor is really popular, and has its performance benefits, but as Linus in one of his videos, he proved that RAM speed over 2666 MHz has very less effect on performance. Why is that so?

I'd assume its because most day-to-day users wouldn't need ram faster than 2666MHz and probably wouldn't notice the difference

[Jurrunio]

It depends on the CPU and task tested, don't take any solid number as the rule for every case.

[WereCat]

10 minutes ago, RTXboy123 said:

Overclocking your processor is really popular, and has its performance benefits, but as Linus in one of his videos, he proved that RAM speed over 2666 MHz has very less effect on performance. Why is that so?

You must have watched some really old video because the RAM speed definitely matters a lot these days on both Intel and AMD.

 

The problem with RAM speed is that the "speed" or "clock" itself is meaningless without knowing the timings and therefore, higher speed with bad timings will result in worse performance.

[IPD]

It depends on application.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ram-speed,5951.html

 

FWIW though, OC your CPU isn't a magic bullet like it used to be.  IMHO, the golden-era of that was single-core and early dual-core days.  Hyperthreading and multi-threading have drastically improved since then, and with even midrange CPU's with 6 cores--the returns have diminished greatly.

 

I also gather (from numerous places I've read) where speeds > 3200MHz can be a stability crapshoot.  And I would argue that rank and latency timings have more to do with performance than just MHz--when you're beyond 2666.

[Haswellx86]

Well obviously I know that, that is why most budget computers come with 2666 MHz RAM. But what I am trying to say is that there is a significant performance increase with processor overclocking, but not with memory overclocking

[IPD]

1 minute ago, RTXboy123 said:

Well obviously I know that, that is why most budget computers come with 2666 MHz RAM. But what I am trying to say is that there is a significant performance increase with processor overclocking, but not with memory overclocking

Depends on the CPU and depends on the application.  There are instances where OC the CPU does virtually nothing.

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, RTXboy123 said:

Well obviously I know that, that is why most budget computers come with 2666 MHz RAM. But what I am trying to say is that there is a significant performance increase with processor overclocking, but not with memory overclocking

That's just not true. On Ryzen you typically get more performance from OCing the RAM rather than the CPU.

 

As always, it depends on many things. But you can get as much as 15% to 30% more performance by OCing RAM on modern CPUs.

[Demonic Donut]

2 hours ago, WereCat said:

That's just not true. On Ryzen you typically get more performance from OCing the RAM rather than the CPU.

 

As always, it depends on many things. But you can get as much as 15% to 30% more performance by OCing RAM on modern CPUs.

This is true on tasks that heavily rely on RAM. You can score big in RAM benchmarks by OCing RAM.  You will not get a 30pct increase in FPS in games however.

 

It all depends on use case.