High Bandwidth vs LL mem settings

joejccva

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Jun 16, 2005
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What would be the advantages/disadvantages to using a high bandwidth optimization settings versus the low latency optimization settings when setting your ram up for OC'ing?

Once again thanks for all your help.
Joe
 

jpeyton

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You can have both low latencies and high bandwidth.
 

joejccva

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Jun 16, 2005
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Originally posted by: jpeyton
You can have both low latencies and high bandwidth.

I guess my question is what's the difference between the two? Is there one preferable to the other?
 

jpeyton

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Latency is the time it takes to access the RAM, and bandwidth is the amount of RAM that can be theoretically accessed per second.

Athlon 64s have an on-die memory controller, which lowers latencies significantly. Bandwidth is also high with the dual-channel DDR platform for Socket 939 processors.

Generally, increasing the memory clock increases bandwidth. But you can only increase the memory clock to a certain point with certain latencies. For example, my TCCD memory does 2-2-2-5 latencies at 200MHz, but I have to lower the latencies to 2.5-3-3-5 at 260MHz.

Is bandwidth or low latencies better? That is ultimately up to the task at hand. If you're thinking of a particular application or game, benchmark it with both settings and decide.
 

imported_wyrmrider

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Dec 6, 2004
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The Low Latency and High bandwidth solution is also the high $$$ solution
as jeypton well put it your mileage will vary by application
if we translate his figures into nanoseconds we see that the latency in TIME is almost the same
the ram will only work so fast
25% faster bus 25% lower settings
the settings are in clocks
at 200 MHZ each clock is about 5ns
at 300 MHz 3338 would be about the same

some benchmarks will vary due to back to back reads and writes