How much impact do RAM speeds have on gaming performance?

[code255]

Hello,

How much impact do RAM speeds (with this I mean all of the RAM attributes except for size) really have on gaming performance? Will extremely high-end RAM, which is being marketed as RAM for gamers, really make games run better than fairly "normal" RAM? Would it be worth buying some really high-end RAM from, say, Geil or OZC for a significantly higher price than value RAM (of the same type, e.g. PC3200) from Crucial or Kingston? I'm only concerned about gaming performance (framerates; both average framerates and high lower-bound framerates) - I don't care how many queries a DBMS on my system could execute per second, or anything like that.

(Assume I've got a Athlon 64. For these processors, RAM speeds is less important than for Intel ones, right?)

I know that games load quicker if one has faster RAM (but quantity plays a big role here too). But what about in-game performance?

I know that if one has too little RAM the system needs to load data from the hard-disk into memory, which typically makes framerates stutter. But if one has more than enough RAM for the game to reside in memory, will the RAM's speed make a noticable difference? Will uberfast RAM improve performance? Will value RAM (I'm not talking about the cheapest stuff from somem dodgy, no-name manufacturer, but reasonably-priced stuff from decent manufacturers) be a bottleneck in the system and limit performance?

I'm a fairly competitive gamer and my current system isn't really good enough for Counter-Strike: Source or World of Warcraft at high resolutions, so I'm thinking of buying a new system fairly soon. But I'm a fairly poor student, I don't want to spend lots of money on expensive RAM if it doesn't really a noticable difference...

 

[svi]

Kind of... this is tricky. There are a whole lot of factors here. I'll deal with the easiest one first, latency.

Low latency is not that important for performance. That's right, I said it. Low latency is great for OCing, because it gives you more room to push the speeds, but the performance difference between 2-2-2 and 3-4-4 is not something you'll be noticing in the real world. The only time you'll be seeing a >5-6% difference in games is with old extremely CPU-limited games like Quake III, and your framerates will be through the roof (consistently above your monitor's refresh rate) with these games anyway, so it really doesn't matter.

RAM speed is not the most important thing for performance, in and of itself, but what IS important is keeping the memory at at least a 1:1 ratio with the FSB. (Let's pretend the HTB is the FSB for the A64.) If the memory isn't fast enough, you will have a minor memory bottleneck in your system. It's not the end of the world, but it's there, it's ugly, and it will become more important as you raise CPU and video card core/memory speeds.

So that's framerates out of the way. How about load times? Well, they're not really an issue. The bottleneck with loads is generally the hard disk.. higher-latency memory can't add a significant amount of time to loads. Quantity of memory can be a bottleneck here too, simply because more has to be regularly loaded into memory, but you didn't ask about quantity.

You might be wondering what the point of buying expensive memory is if you don't want to overclock. The answer is that there is none. The only things you need to worry about if you're not OCing are to get memory of adequate speed for your system (that usually means PC3200 these days) and of decent quality (because it sort of sucks to get Memtest-unstable stuff).

 

[Caminetto]

You will find many here that are fanatics about performance down to the milisecond. I hope they enjoy their ultimate gaming rig, but in the end it's a dick measuring contest.
Get good RAM, Crucial or something, and spend the money saved on a faster processor or better video card.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

I honestly dont think its worth the money for low latency memory. I just use normal crucial PC3200, its the best ram on the market IMO. I'm sure it makes a dif in benchies, but its just not worth the money unless you have the newest/latest/greatest everything else in your machine

 

[SunSamurai]

It does make a small differance, there was something about it here somewhere. I cant find the page. A better grafix card would do more.

 

[beany323]

Originally posted by: Caminetto
.............. but in the end it's a dick measuring contest.

cool i can buy my way to a first place!!!!