How fast should my ram be??

[Mitch Anderson]

Hello everybody,

I am building a (sort of) budget gaming pc, and my goals for ram are that I have 16 Gb of ddr4, but that is about all I know, if I were to get ddr4 memory, how fast would it need to be? Would 2133 mhz be fast enough, or should I go for something faster like 2400 mhz, or something beyond?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

OP

[TheRandomness]

-Thread moved to CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

The cheapest if you're on a budget. RAM speed makes little difference to performance in most games. 

[Mitch Anderson]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

The cheapest if you're on a budget. RAM speed makes little difference to performance in most games. 

Thank you, I will definitely keep this in mind for my build.

[HelplmChoking]

3 minutes ago, Mitch Anderson said:

Hello everybody,

I am building a (sort of) budget gaming pc, and my goals for ram are that I have 16 Gb of ddr4, but that is about all I know, if I were to get ddr4 memory, how fast would it need to be? Would 2133 mhz be fast enough, or should I go for something faster like 2400 mhz, or something beyond?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

OP

 

DDR4 speeds make a tiny little difference, which is still more than it used to. 2133MHz is totally fast enough, but moving to much higher speeds (3200MHz+) could give a couple frames extra on a Ryzen system. Even then, it's not worth spending much extra. If the higher speed is less than $10 more, may as well but otherwise nah.

[Add2017]

1 minute ago, Rangaman42 said:

DDR4 speeds make a tiny little difference, which is still more than it used to. 2133MHz is totally fast enough, but moving to much higher speeds (3200MHz+) could give a couple frames extra on a Ryzen system. Even then, it's not worth spending much extra. If the higher speed is less than $10 more, may as well but otherwise nah.

Also you can usually overclock ram

[sgloux3470]

RAM speed is only really relevant for competitive benchmarking.

For real world use, you're better off with slower, stable RAM since it will allow you to push your CPU overclock better than faster, more unstable RAM and result in a much larger net performance boost than faster RAM will.

[HelplmChoking]

Just now, Add2017 said:

Also you can usually overclock ram

That's true, my setup doesn't have XMP support (although it'll handle 384GB of ECC RAM) but I'm sure it can't be that hard.

[HKZeroFive]

So much misinformation being spread around here.

1 hour ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

RAM speed makes little difference to performance in most games. 

 

It's been proven time and time again that RAM speed can make significant performance improvements in a wide variety of games so why are people still saying this? The bottom line is that faster RAM will give you higher minimum framerates, which is one of the most important metrics when it comes to gaming, if not the most important. However, in CPU-bound games where the CPU is essentially the bottleneck, faster RAM may give you higher average framerates, which is a nice thing to have.

 

LTT has completely neglected minimum framerates (the biggest benefit from faster memory) in their testing, and also used massively GPU bound settings with a mediocre GPU, the GTX 660Ti. So their conclusion is invalid. But as a result of that video, people have been spouting the same rubbish of "faster RAM gives little to no benefit in games" when the evidence says otherwise.

 

A few videos by Digital Foundry (who have actually tested this the proper way):

  Hide contents

 

 

1 hour ago, sgloux3470 said:

For real world use, you're better off with slower, stable RAM since it will allow you to push your CPU overclock better than faster, more unstable RAM and result in a much larger net performance boost than faster RAM will.

Memory frequency largely remains isolated from CPU overclocking if you're using the multiplier. While BCLK overclocking can increase memory frequency, faster RAM isn't going to suddenly go unstable and limit a CPU overclock at all.

 

As for CPU overclocking reaping "a much larger net performance boost than faster RAM", Digital Foundry has already proven this to be untrue. In the video below, it can be seen that a stock i7 7700K paired with 3000MHz RAM is significantly faster than a 4.8GHz i7 7700K paired with 2133MHz memory in multiple titles. In Witcher 3 alone, the gains are particularly noticeable.

And here is the correlating chart:

 

1080p/Titan X Pascal OC	Core i7 7700K Stock	Core i7 7700K Stock	Core i7 7700K Stock	Core i7 7700K 4.8GHz	Core i7 7700K 4.8GHz	Core i7 7700K 4.8GHz
DDR4 Clock Speed	3000MHz	2400MHz	2133MHz	3000MHz	2400MHz	2133MHz
Assassin's Creed Unity, Ultra High, FXAA	132.2	129.3	125.3	132.9	129.8	126.6
Ashes of the Singularity, DX12, CPU Test	41.9	38.2	36.2	44.1	40.4	37.4
Crysis 3, Very High, SMAA T2x	138.2	135.0	132.8	145.5	140.7	138.0
The Division, Ultra, SMAA	133.8	133.6	132.1	133.9	133.2	132.6
Far Cry Primal, Ultra, SMAA	137.9	127.5	121.2	140.1	134.4	126.5
Rise of the Tomb Raider DX12, Very High, SMAA	126.5	114.9	108.1	131.0	121.1	111.0
The Witcher 3, Ultra, No Hairworks	139.4	125.7	116.6	145.2	130.8	120.2

1 hour ago, Rangaman42 said:

DDR4 speeds make a tiny little difference, which is still more than it used to. 2133MHz is totally fast enough, but moving to much higher speeds (3200MHz+) could give a couple frames extra on a Ryzen system. Even then, it's not worth spending much extra. If the higher speed is less than $10 more, may as well but otherwise nah.

Spending extra on faster memory is not that different to spending extra on a K-series CPU, a Z-series motherboard and a decent cooler. Yet, somehow, people say that the former isn't worth it? That boggles my mind. In fact, a kit of 3000MHz memory isn't that much expensive at all when you compare it to 2133/2400MHz kits, you're usually looking at a $10 difference. It's more than a "couple of frames", by the way.

2 hours ago, Mitch Anderson said:

Hello everybody,

I am building a (sort of) budget gaming pc, and my goals for ram are that I have 16 Gb of ddr4, but that is about all I know, if I were to get ddr4 memory, how fast would it need to be? Would 2133 mhz be fast enough, or should I go for something faster like 2400 mhz, or something beyond?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

OP

A kit of 3000MHz RAM (the sweetspot) isn't that much more expensive than kits of 2133/2400MHz RAM these days so I honestly doubt that it'll eat into your budget. If it's only around $10 more, then I suggest you get it. Although you will need a Z-motherboard to utilise it, it'd be nice to have if you're going to upgrade sometime in the future.

 

Not saying that faster RAM is a "must-have" considering that you're on a budget, but when people say that "faster RAM doesn't do anything in gaming", they're wrong.

[Ostwind]

look at the max supported speed of your motherboard then triple it, then buy the closest thing to that that your board supports then call the customer support of the company that made the RAM that you bought and complain that they dont make RAM thats fast enough. Then call the customer support of the company that made your motherboard and complain that its their fault that faster RAM doesnt exist because their board doesnt support it.

 

Bonus points if you twitter spam both companies accounts telling them to stop discriminating against high speed RAM.

[Mitch Anderson]

18 hours ago, Ostwind said:

look at the max supported speed of your motherboard then triple it, then buy the closest thing to that that your board supports then call the customer support of the company that made the RAM that you bought and complain that they dont make RAM thats fast enough. Then call the customer support of the company that made your motherboard and complain that its their fault that faster RAM doesnt exist because their board doesnt support it.

 

Bonus points if you twitter spam both companies accounts telling them to stop discriminating against high speed RAM.

Maybe I could even pay the Onion to write a story about how bad the companies motherboards are...

[sgloux3470]

On ‎2017‎-‎03‎-‎14 at 8:44 PM, HKZeroFive said:

 

As for CPU overclocking reaping "a much larger net performance boost than faster RAM", Digital Foundry has already proven this to be untrue. In the video below, it can be seen that a stock i7 7700K paired with 3000MHz RAM is significantly faster than a 4.8GHz i7 7700K paired with 2133MHz memory in multiple titles. In Witcher 3 alone, the gains are particularly noticeable.

Were they using XMP versus motherboard defaults?  Two entirely different RAM kits with completely different settings?  They don't provide enough information about their methodology.  If you simply lower the clockspeed in the UEFI you can be changing dozens of settings on the RAM that could add up to a larger performance delta.  It could even be running the lower clock speeds in single channel mode by default.

 

A better test would be to compare different RAM kits running at their XMP, since lower clocked RAM kits would have much lower timings and optimized settings for their stated clock speed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

[HKZeroFive]

1 hour ago, sgloux3470 said:

Were they using XMP versus motherboard defaults?  Two entirely different RAM kits with completely different settings?  They don't provide enough information about their methodology.  If you simply lower the clockspeed in the UEFI you can be changing dozens of settings on the RAM that could add up to a larger performance delta.  It could even be running the lower clock speeds in single channel mode by default.

 

A better test would be to compare different RAM kits running at their XMP, since lower clocked RAM kits would have much lower timings and optimized settings for their stated clock speed. 

"We paired this board with four sticks of Corsair Vengeance LPX at 3000MHz, with 15-17-17-35 latency". Honestly, I doubt using the same kit of memory and adjusting the clockspeed is going to paint a less accurate picture of how memory frequency/bandwidth can produce significant performance gains, as compared to having lower clocked memory kits and enabling XMP.

 

Digital Foundry has demonstrated this using two separate kits of memory (1600MHz and 2133MHz) in their i5 2500K video. And lo and behold, the minimum and average framerate is significantly higher.