RAM Timings VS. Speed

[ZombifiedPyro]

Hello LTT Forums,

I was looking at RAM sticks on newegg and there were two sets of dual channel 8GB RAM sticks that were $80. One of them was 1600 with timings of 7-8-8-24, the other 2133 with timings of 9-11-10-30. Which one is better?

[M-ursu]

Faster is better.

[TechFan@ic]

The overall performance of RAM is determined by both, speeds & latency , the lower the latency the better performance you'll get with productivity workloads like video editing and rendering.

The higher the speeds the better overall CPU performance you'll get in games (this is especially true for AMD FX CPUs, they can benefit quite a bit from speeds).

Graphics cores on intel CPUs & AMD APUs also benefit from higher speeds.

[ZombifiedPyro]

This system would be built around 7870/7950 and an FX-8350 purely for gaming.

[christoi]

Theoretically? The 2133 kit would be faster.

Practically? Absolutely no difference in real world performance. Even with specific benchmarking applicatons, the difference is too small to be noticeable. If my calculations are correct, in a perfect sitatuion where the only bottleneck is with the memory speeds, the difference will be less than 1% between the kits.

$80 is ridiculously expensive for an 8GB kit of memory though, even with the rising prices. You can get an kit clocked at 1866mhz with 9-10-9-27 timings for $48.

[TechFan@ic]

This system would be built around 7870/7950 and an FX-8350 purely for gaming.

Definitely go for the faster RAM, the FX 8350 really benefits from higher speeds.

[Dave :)]

This system would be built around 7870/7950 and an FX-8350 purely for gaming.

You would need to overclock to use the 2133 kit (i believe), but that's pretty straight forward. For gaming, 1600 speed is more than enough and i don't really think you would notice a huge difference in performance from using 2133.

[ZombifiedPyro]

Found the color I wanted. Here are the updated prices and specs of RAM I am comparing:

Speed - Timings - Price (USD)

1866 - 9-10-9-27 - $63.60

1600 - 9-9-9-24 - $64.38

1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99

2133 - 11-11-11-27 - 82.37

[TechFan@ic]

This system would be built around 7870/7950 and an FX-8350 purely for gaming.

You would need to overclock to use the 2133 kit (i believe), but that's pretty straight forward. For gaming, 1600 speed is more than enough and i don't really think you would notice a huge difference in performance from using 2133.

It actually makes quite the difference on AMD FX processors.

[TechFan@ic]

Found the color I wanted. Here are the updated prices and specs of RAM I am comparing: Speed - Timings - Price (USD) 1866 - 9-10-9-27 - $63.60 1600 - 9-9-9-24 - $64.38 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 2133 - 11-11-11-27 - 82.37

I'd personally grab this : 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 and overclock it myself .

[ZombifiedPyro]

How do you overclock RAM?

[Salmiakbal]

Found the color I wanted. Here are the updated prices and specs of RAM I am comparing: Speed - Timings - Price (USD) 1866 - 9-10-9-27 - $63.60 1600 - 9-9-9-24 - $64.38 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 2133 - 11-11-11-27 - 82.37

I'd personally grab this : 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 and overclock it myself .

Link to why Fx processors work better with faster RAM? I think you're confusing it with an APU.

Ram speed or latency doesn't do anything, especially for games

[TechFan@ic]

Found the color I wanted. Here are the updated prices and specs of RAM I am comparing: Speed - Timings - Price (USD) 1866 - 9-10-9-27 - $63.60 1600 - 9-9-9-24 - $64.38 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 2133 - 11-11-11-27 - 82.37

I'd personally grab this : 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 and overclock it myself .

No lol, I'm not confusing it with APUs because I specifically mentioned both in my first post.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1140459/bulldozer-overclocking-guide-performance-scaling-charts-max-ocs-ln2-results-coming

Scroll down to the charts.

[Dave :)]

This system would be built around 7870/7950 and an FX-8350 purely for gaming.

You would need to overclock to use the 2133 kit (i believe), but that's pretty straight forward. For gaming, 1600 speed is more than enough and i don't really think you would notice a huge difference in performance from using 2133.

How so? I'm not questioning; i'm actually genuinely interested.

[Dave :)]

Found the color I wanted. Here are the updated prices and specs of RAM I am comparing: Speed - Timings - Price (USD) 1866 - 9-10-9-27 - $63.60 1600 - 9-9-9-24 - $64.38 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 2133 - 11-11-11-27 - 82.37

I'd personally grab this : 1600 - 8-9-8-24 - $68.99 and overclock it myself .

I may have misread the above charts; however, it seemed to suggest that 1600mhz offered the best performance? The jump between 1333 - 1600 was big, but then from 1600 - 1866, performance dropped slightly?

[TechFan@ic]

This system would be built around 7870/7950 and an FX-8350 purely for gaming.

You would need to overclock to use the 2133 kit (i believe), but that's pretty straight forward. For gaming, 1600 speed is more than enough and i don't really think you would notice a huge difference in performance from using 2133.

I'm not sure why this is, but several benchmarks seem to show that FX processors favor faster RAM, which is ironic seeing how integrated memory controllers support a maximum of 1866 on those chips but any decent motherboard will easily manage 2133 on all four dims.

Logan from Tek Syndicate mentioned this before as well as Linus during his last live stream.

[TechFan@ic]

How do you overclock RAM?

You go into the BIOS and raise the speeds.

You should be able to get 2133Mhz on Cas 11 .

[ZombifiedPyro]

What do I raise to increase the speed? Then should I increase the other timings, and then slowly bring them down one by one?

Edit: Do you think that both sets would work at the same settings. The 2133 running at 1600 with 8-9-8-24, and the 1600 running at 2133 with 11-11-11-27?

[christoi]

To be honest, I feel you are focusing too much of the marginal performance differences and investing too much money where it's not really beneficial. The performance difference may be present, but often it's only really noticeable with synthetic CPU-intensive benchmarks where performance increases can be seen. With gaming however, it's more often the case that you are GPU-bottlenecked, so performance gains from anything else tends to be highly minimal. Even when comparing 1333mhz memory with 2133, with most games you'll be looking at an almost negligible performance difference (scroll down to the bottom for gaming benchmarks).

On the note of overclocking, memory kits are labeled at specific speeds and timings as they are guaranteed to work at such speeds, however that doesn't mean you can't push it further. This is like overclocking any other component though, you can get a 1600mhz kit that overclocks flawlessly to 2133mhz without a change in timings, but with another kit it would barely run at stock settings. Generally speaking you'll be able to push it a bit past the rated specs, but there's no guarantee either.