Does RAM speed (MHz and/or latency) affect gaming or anything else?

[MageTank]

2 minutes ago, Zyndo said:

I wasn't talking about his CPU. If he doesn't want to deal with the hassles of overclocking [any component], then he shouldn't get overclockable RAM. Even XMP settings can be unstable (XMP IS overclocking, just with predetermined parameters). My Corsair 3000MHz RAM isn't 100% stable on my Z170-A motherboard in XMP mode and causes occasional crashes. If he doesn't want to deal with overclocking, or that potential risk, then he should not pay more in order to get something he isn't interested in... If stability and no-hassle are his priorities, then he should get 2133MHZ memory, save himself a bit of money, and call it a day. No need to confuse the matter any further than that.

 

I think for your desires and what you want out of your system you should get 2133MHz (or maybe choose your RAM for an aesthetic reason) and call it a day.

You are 100% correct in that XMP can be unstable (I say this to people all the time, and they never believe me). The reason it's unstable, is less to do with the IMC itself, and more to do with the board. XMP's are basically factory binned kits. Their IC's are binned, and sold at their rated speeds after passing tests from their manufacturers. As we've discussed before, there is plenty of data to suggest Skylake's IMC is perfectly capable of handing 3200mhz for the most part. Is it possible you lost the IMC lottery, and can't handle 3000mhz? Sure, but it's very unlikely. What is more likely, is your ram isn't validated to work with your board at it's XMP settings. Specific boards like specific frequencies, but they also like specific IC's. There is a reason when you look at memory compatibility lists, that they also list the IC (Hynix, Micron, Samsung, Elpida, etc). Micron IC's are the most tame as far as tertiary timing tolerance goes, with Samsung and Hynix being extremely picky on their values. It's likely that your XMP profile loads information that demands timings your board is incapable of delivering, so it settles with the next best thing, leading to instability.

 

Should OP avoid this entirely, and settle with less performance for potentially more stability? That's his choice, but as long as he picks a quality board, and his IMC isn't utter garbage (again, it's unlikely to get an IMC that bad), he should be fine. Also, I am pretty sure I can get your 3000mhz kit to work, if you are willing to put in the time. I live by a very specific motto: "Anything can be fixed by making enough love to the tertiaries".

[Zyndo]

6 minutes ago, Majestic said:

That's your substantial evidence, your n=1 subjective (and perhaps incompetent) opinion? 

 

wew

lad

Incompetent? Are you trying to start a flame war? lol

bruh its XMP. you hit a button and it is supposed to work. that is the point. Hard to do that wrong lol (and my BCLK ratio is 100.00 so no, that isn't throwing it off either)

I know its an anecdotal justification for another reason why he should avoid faster RAM.... but he really doesn't need it. I've said it several times now. There is no sense in investing extra money in a feature he himself described as him/her not being interested in it.


seesh, some people sure can get worked up over a handful of potential fps in a few select games lol.

[Majestic]

3 minutes ago, Zyndo said:

seesh, some people sure can get worked up over a handful of potential fps in a few select games lol.

I said perhaps.

 

Also, can you clean up? You're getting straw all over the place. "seesh".. strawmen.

[Zyndo]

2 minutes ago, MageTank said:

Also, I am pretty sure I can get your 3000mhz kit to work, if you are willing to put in the time. I live by a very specific motto: "Anything can be fixed by making enough love to the tertiaries".

No worries. I'm sure I could get around to working it out as well if I so chose. I'm currently running a 60hz monitor until i can get a PG348Q or mayube a PG27UQ (when it releases) so I haven't really needed the performance boost. All of my games run very well so I've not really bothered to look into. All i was saying was it didn't work out of the box like it should have (although it runs stock speeds just fine) so if what he is interested in is "no hassle" gaming, then 2133MHz is the smartest thing (imo) to do for this specific user and he can pocket the extra money he saved in order to take his "friend" out to a movie or something

[Bleedingyamato]

5 minutes ago, MageTank said:

You are 100% correct in that XMP can be unstable (I say this to people all the time, and they never believe me). The reason it's unstable, is less to do with the IMC itself, and more to do with the board. XMP's are basically factory binned kits. Their IC's are binned, and sold at their rated speeds after passing tests from their manufacturers. As we've discussed before, there is plenty of data to suggest Skylake's IMC is perfectly capable of handing 3200mhz for the most part. Is it possible you lost the IMC lottery, and can't handle 3000mhz? Sure, but it's very unlikely. What is more likely, is your ram isn't validated to work with your board at it's XMP settings. Specific boards like specific frequencies, but they also like specific IC's. There is a reason when you look at memory compatibility lists, that they also list the IC (Hynix, Micron, Samsung, Elpida, etc). Micron IC's are the most tame as far as tertiary timing tolerance goes, with Samsung and Hynix being extremely picky on their values. It's likely that your XMP profile loads information that demands timings your board is incapable of delivering, so it settles with the next best thing, leading to instability.

 

Should OP avoid this entirely, and settle with less performance for potentially more stability? That's his choice, but as long as he picks a quality board, and his IMC isn't utter garbage (again, it's unlikely to get an IMC that bad), he should be fine. Also, I am pretty sure I can get your 3000mhz kit to work, if you are willing to put in the time. I live by a very specific motto: "Anything can be fixed by making enough love to the tertiaries".

It may be worth mentioning again, since I mentioned also in a previous post in this thread if you want to look at that, that I have Corsair RAM in my main desktop with a Z170 board from the same manufacturer as the friend the RAM I'm buying will be for.  

 

Anyway, when I'd tried to enable XMP after I'd installed my Corsair Vengence LPX 3000MHz kit I got some rather nasty blue screen errors.  I say nasty since one time it happened the crash must've been bad I assume since it triggered to the backup bios and reverted my motherboard back to it after I'd updated to the most recent version at the time.  

 

 

So I wonder if the problem I and Zyndo have with trying to use XMP on our corsair ram could indicate a problem with corsair and XMP?

[Majestic]

1 minute ago, Bleedingyamato said:

So I wonder if the problem I and Zyndo have with trying to use XMP on our corsair ram could indicate a problem with corsair and XMP?

<- Corsair Vengeance Pro Red 16GB DDR3-2400 CL11 works fine with XMP.

 

[MageTank]

2 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

It may be worth mentioning again, since I mentioned also in a previous post in this thread if you want to look at that, that I have Corsair RAM in my main desktop with a Z170 board from the same manufacturer as the friend the RAM I'm buying will be for.  

 

Anyway, when I'd tried to enable XMP after I'd installed my Corsair Vengence LPX 3000MHz kit I got some rather nasty blue screen errors.  I say nasty since one time it happened the crash must've been bad I assume since it triggered to the backup bios and reverted my motherboard back to it after I'd updated to the most recent version at the time.  

 

 

So I wonder if the problem I and Zyndo have with trying to use XMP on our corsair ram could indicate a problem with corsair and XMP?

It's likely the IC's on your kits that corsair uses. Corsair favors SK Hynix on their kits, and Hynix prefers their tertiary timings to be trained in a very specific way. Do you or @Zyndo know the exact model number for your ram kit? You can get this information from the SPD tab of CPU-Z. I might be able to tell you the optimal timings for your kits so that it works fine.

 

Another place to check, is the voltage settings under the BIOS. I've noticed that a lot of DDR4 kits load obscene levels of VCCIO/VCCSA voltages. My 3200 C14 kit loads 1.25 VCCIO and 1.3 VCCSA. These values are too high, as my kit is stable with 1.15v in each value. Too much VCCIO/VCCSA is just as unstable as too little. It's a balancing act. 

[Bleedingyamato]

3 minutes ago, MageTank said:

It's likely the IC's on your kits that corsair uses. Corsair favors SK Hynix on their kits, and Hynix prefers their tertiary timings to be trained in a very specific way. Do you or @Zyndo know the exact model number for your ram kit? You can get this information from the SPD tab of CPU-Z. I might be able to tell you the optimal timings for your kits so that it works fine.

 

Another place to check, is the voltage settings under the BIOS. I've noticed that a lot of DDR4 kits load obscene levels of VCCIO/VCCSA voltages. My 3200 C14 kit loads 1.25 VCCIO and 1.3 VCCSA. These values are too high, as my kit is stable with 1.15v in each value. Too much VCCIO/VCCSA is just as unstable as too little. It's a balancing act. 

This is the kit I have:

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014JESKRW/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Spoiler

 

Edited February 7, 2017 by Bleedingyamato

[Zyndo]

8 minutes ago, MageTank said:

@Zyndo know the exact model number for your ram kit?

I can't be bothered to work this all out at this time. As I said earlier, I'm on a 60hz monitor so I'm already getting all the performance i can get out of my system anyway. Thanks for the offer though =)

[MageTank]

9 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

This is the kit I have:

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014JESKRW/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Yeah, that kit is supported by your motherboard just fine. You might need to update your BIOS so that it can properly communicate with that ram's XMP. A lot of boards release XMP compatibility updates through the BIOS. Your board has several: http://ca.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z170X-Gaming-7-rev-10#support-dl

[JoostinOnline]

2 hours ago, Princess Cadence said:

Before skylake it didnt matter at all, on haswell, sandy and other older architectures that used ddr3 the speed differences in performance were negligible.

 

skylake and kaby lake that uses ddr4 on the other hand finally shown significant improvement as you get higher memory frequencies, sure if you get just 2133mhz it will still be very good but there might be up to 10fps improvement in games going with 3000mhz speeds.

 

Keep in mind you usually need a z or x board to get support for higher memory frequency speeds than 2400mhz.

That's not true. There is a noticeable difference. It's just that CPU intensive games didn't start coming out until the end of Haswell's life, so nobody noticed on games. If you compare higher clocked RAM (mine is 2400MHz) to something lower you'll notice a big difference. The difference also seems to increase between frequencies as they go up. 

[Bleedingyamato]

1 hour ago, MageTank said:

Yeah, that kit is supported by your motherboard just fine. You might need to update your BIOS so that it can properly communicate with that ram's XMP. A lot of boards release XMP compatibility updates through the BIOS. Your board has several: http://ca.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z170X-Gaming-7-rev-10#support-dl

I'm using the F7 bios.  The problem is I can't remember if I tried XMP with this bios version.  

 

 

I'd be tempted to update to F8 and try again but I'm afraid to since my computer has been stable aside from one or two times where I think I had to force a restart because of a freeze up or something minor.  

 

I had just manually set the RAM to 2800MHz and the DRAM voltage to 1.34V.  Both down slightly from what the XMP profile would set the RAM to in case it helped it run properly.  

 

So far as I know it has worked fine ever since.  

Spoiler

 

Edited February 8, 2017 by Bleedingyamato

[Guest]

20 hours ago, Bleedingyamato said:

I'm starting to look for new RAM (2x8GB) to replace the 2x4GB sticks that are currently in my friend's desktop but idk what if any effect the MHz and latency have on Gaming or other performance.  

 

 

I don't have any graphs or recordings comparing all the different kinds of RAM when it comes to speed and latency. What I do have is anecdotal accounts of having purchased varying speeds of DDR3 RAM from 1600MHz up to 2166MHz and playing first person shooters, RPGs and strategy games. I max out every setting I can but do not overclock any of my components. The most graphically intense game I own is GTA V; the most CPU intensive game I own is Rome: Total War II. I'm a gamer, that's all my rig is designed to do. And in these games I've come to one simple conclusion.

 

I did not notice any real world difference between them. Perhaps a few FPS was gained, perhaps not. Perhaps some were more efficient then others, perhaps not. My games ran smooth and that's all that mattered. So my methodology nowadays is to buy RAM that's sexy looking, has a solid warranty, and is a balance between speed and latency. There are many memory experts in this thread - I am not among them. Just dropping by and giving my two cents for whatever that may be worth to the OP or anyone else.

[Bleedingyamato]

3 hours ago, Stylized_Violence said:

I don't have any graphs or recordings comparing all the different kinds of RAM when it comes to speed and latency. What I do have is anecdotal accounts of having purchased varying speeds of DDR3 RAM from 1600MHz up to 2166MHz and playing first person shooters, RPGs and strategy games. I max out every setting I can but do not overclock any of my components. The most graphically intense game I own is GTA V; the most CPU intensive game I own is Rome: Total War II. I'm a gamer, that's all my rig is designed to do. And in these games I've come to one simple conclusion.

 

I did not notice any real world difference between them. Perhaps a few FPS was gained, perhaps not. Perhaps some were more efficient then others, perhaps not. My games ran smooth and that's all that mattered. So my methodology nowadays is to buy RAM that's sexy looking, has a solid warranty, and is a balance between speed and latency. There are many memory experts in this thread - I am not among them. Just dropping by and giving my two cents for whatever that may be worth to the OP or anyone else.

Thank you for sharing your experience.  

 

It seems from what I can tell based on what people in this thread have said that faster RAM can help if it's fast enough but it might not always help or be cost effective.  

 

So I think the best option is a combination of all the insight here:

1. Get fast RAM when possible.

2. Balance cost vs speed to avoid diminishing returns and dramatic increases in cost.  

3. Get RAM you like the look of.