Is DDR3 1600 still giving equal or better performance than 1833/2133?

[Dylie]

I remember reading an Anandtech bench about a year ago and it basically said that DDR3 1600 with tighter timings was giving not only equal performance across the board, in some instances it was performing better.

I am curious if this has been fixed now with QPI and SNB? I am coming from a s939 AMD build where timings were almost always more important than pure speed unless you increased speed by 25% (200 to 250) and only increased timings from 2 to 2.5, if increased all the was to a cas of 3 then the memory would need to operate damn near 300 to be as effective.

From the benchmark that Anandtech posted it seemed that the same was true of the DDR3 memory currently being used whereas it wasnt nearly as important with DDR2

 

[theAnimal]

Faster RAM or tighter timings make very little difference overall.

 

[nanaki333]

the only time that faster memory makes a noticeable difference, is on the new AMD APUs. your FPS gets a pretty healthy boost with faster memory. anything with a discrete GPU, the performance difference is nothing you're going to notice.

 

[Spikesoldier]

new article on anandtech main site on the topic: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3

 

[Zap]

new article on anandtech main site on the topic: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3

Ask and you shall receive?

Interesting looking article. Will read it more thoroughly, but I skipped to the conclusion and found this:

memory is one of the components least likely to play a significant role in performance.

This is what most of us have been saying all along.

There are some caveats, however. The latest integrated graphics really benefits from faster memory, though if you end up paying a huge amount for super fast stuff you may as well just by a discrete card. Also, as the article pointed out the testing is only on Sandy Bridge, and other platforms may or may not have the same results.

I've been a fan of telling people to buy DDR3-1333, but now with DDR3-1600 costing about the same, may as well go with 1600 (as long as it is 1.5v).

 

[exar333]

Intel: Get whatever is cheapest at 1.5v
AMD: Get cheapest on PhII; go higher (1600+) is you plan to stay on AMD when BD is out.