Realistic Benefit of Faster RAM and Smaller Timings

[Water]

Sorry right off the bat if this is not the place to post this, but I - along with all of my friends - was wondering what real kind of performance difference there is between different speeds of RAM and different timings (also: cas latency). From looking at the Wiki, it looks to me like timings make a difference of milliseconds, yet people still think that a cas latency of 11 is noticeably different than a cas latency of 9. Should the difference just be roughly 2 milliseconds, an unnoticeable difference? 

 

As for speeds, I know that faster speeds = faster RAM, but to what extent? If RAM A is clocked 30% higher than RAM B, does RAM A perform 30% faster? or close to it at least? I'm interested to see what you guys think (or know).

Again, I don't post much, and when I do, it's in an already established thread, so if this is the wrong place to put it, feel free to yell at me below.

[Godlygamer23]

The timings tell how fast different parts of RAM respond. Lower CAS latency=lower latency between the CPU and RAM. Main benefits of faster RAM are people that do video editing or convert files. You will get a huge benefit in that regard. In gaming, you may gain 5-10FPS. Having tighter(lower) timings will allow lower clocked RAM to perform better. RAM frequency and timings can be compared to CPUs. CPU A @ 4.2GHz may not perform as well as CPU B @ 4.2GHz per clock because of lower IPC.

[Maskot]

Let's say RAM A is at a stock frequency of 1600MHz, while RAM B is overclocked to 1866MHz, the extra 266MHz means something, but very little right now, seeming as a CPU can only use so much of the memories capability as it is, unless you're overclocking your CPU to an insane amount, 1866MHz, 2133MHz, 2400MHz, they don't really matter because the CPU caps at a certain frequency. If you have 128GB of RAM, then the latency means a lot if you plan on filling it all up (4k uncompressed video file?) but still not really noticeable.

PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG, I don't want to give false information, this is just off the top of my head.

[mvitkun]

@Water

 

as Godlygamer23 said,in workstation applications, 3D modeling/animation/rendering and video editing/rendering low latency with high frequency makes a a huge difference.

 

but in gaming anything above,IMO, 1600mhz CL10 is more or less a waste of money due to a need to throw money into the fire.

 

@Maskot

 

that would depend on the frequency of ram A and ram B as well as their application.

 

if they are applied to the workstation applications I mentioned above then ram A may be faster depending on both of their latencies.

 

if ram A is 1600mhz CL8 while ram B is 1866 CL12 I would argue that ram A would be much more beneficial due to it's low latency than ram B due to it's higher frequency at the cost of latency.

 

though for gaming the difference between the two would be negligible.

 

not sure about the quantity of ram making a huge difference,mostly because you can only write to a max of 4 dimms simultaneously

(LGA 2011),and at 128GB you'd need either 8 sticks of 16GB DIMMs or 16 sticks of 8GB DIMMS.and it would cap at the channels before the frequency could make a huge difference.

 

although working with uncompressed files in video editing applications,especially huge 500GB-1TB files like 4K,would see a very significant benefit from higher frequency,provided they have low latency as well.