DDR4 RAM Speed

[Mages]

So... I'm looking at putting together a wishlist for a Mini ITX build and I was wondering if there were any significant performance differences for gaming and general use of DDR4 RAM speed.
My main concerns are 1) What exactly do you benefit from when overclocking RAM and 2) Should I buy the highest speed possible that is supported by the motherboard.

The motherboard and CPU I'm considering are the ASUS Maximus VIII Impact and i5-6600k. Also, I am looking to use a 10 series GTX GPU

[Squish4058]

one benefit is for CPU dependant games where there are lots of projectiles will rely on fast ram for FPS
my fav game planetside 2 goes from 130 fps flying in a plane to 19 minimum when on the ground with 80v80 player fights and i Have 1333mhz ddr3
basically it doesnt matter how much vram your gpu has if your cpu is using slow ddr ram

[TheProfessionalAmateurs]

RAM SPEED DOES NOT MATTER. You may get one more fps if your buy the ram that's 10 more dollars, and has a higher frequency. Also, ram overclocking is difficult to do. DDR4 2400 speed is plenty. The build that you are considering on looks great, except you should get a core i7 6700k, along with a cheaper motherboard, or get a cheaper motherboard, core i5, and then you can get a gtx 1070 for a little bit more money.

[rattacko123]

RAM speed only matters if you play fallout 4 or use iGPU, most games don't benefit from more ram speed. Besides, if you really needed the bandwidth, you may as well go for an X99 system with quad channel ram

[Mages]

1 minute ago, TheProfessionalAmateurs said:

RAM SPEED DOES NOT MATTER. You may get one more fps if your buy the ram that's 10 more dollars, and has a higher frequency. Also, ram overclocking is difficult to do. DDR4 2400 speed is plenty. The build that you are considering on looks great, except you should get a core i7 6700k, along with a cheaper motherboard, or get a cheaper motherboard, core i5, and then you can get a gtx 1070 for a little bit more money.

So another question then. Why are there different RAM speeds for consumers? The motherboard is the main thing I would like to retain and I wont be doing many tasks (if any) that will require the added benefit of hyperthreading that comes on the 6700k and the 6600k retains nearly all of the raw per-core performance.

[TheProfessionalAmateurs]

In heavier rendering crap that only people like Disney animators use, the faster ram matters. "Gaming" ram comes with different frequencies to pretty much draw inexperienced builders to get the faster RAM for 20 extra dollars. You only get a benefit with faster ram if you make a ram drive, which makes your ram act as really fast storage, and then it caches into your drive when you shut your computer down.

[Imakuni]

8 minutes ago, Mages said:

1) What exactly do you benefit from when overclocking RAM

You get a bit of a boost in performance. It depends on how much, but it's generally worth to just pay those extra 10$ and have it.

10 minutes ago, Mages said:

2) Should I buy the highest speed possible that is supported by the motherboard.

The law of diminishing returns kicks hard here. Very high frequencies don't really help all that much. I usually recommend going with a 3000mhz kit as it's already plenty while not being particularly more expensive. 3200mhz, if only a dollar or so more expensive, is also worth it. But you don't need to go ballz to the wallz with the max supported speed.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Mages said:

. Why are there different RAM speeds for consumers?

Because they can. You gotta make the more expensive sku better somehow.

 

Faster ram will make some tasks faster.http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell

 

Some tasks are 10-20% faster with fast ram(mainly compression)

 

Not many people care, but its nice to have for those who do.

 

 

[Mages]

So I guess I should just focus on aesthetics and quality then and something around ~3000MHz

[Nedrozak]

Any CPU Heavy task will benefit from faster ram. Big CPU intensive open world games especially.

[Mages]

The most graphically intensive game I play is ARK and the only real bottleneck I currently have on my laptop is the GPU so I guess I'll just look at getting RAM that looks nice when the setup and invest more money in the GPU.