Memory Speed: Real World Differences

[MajorKong]

I'll be building a system around an Asus PC4800-E Deluxe motherboard and P4 3.0 with 1 GB of RAM. I'm not going to be overclocking the system at all. Stability of the system is one of my chief goals, though I'd like it to be fast enough that I won't worry about upgrading for maybe 1 1/2 to 2 years. In that light I'll probably be using ECC memory in the system. What are the real-world speed penalties of running, say, CL3 ECC vs. running the fastest CL2 non-ECC RAM with the fastest memory timings available (but at stock bus speeds)?

I'd be interested in hearing estimates of overall system performance difference/degradation (not memory benchmark differences) between these two memory extremes in such real world tasks and video rendering and gaming. Let's say in percent. Are we looking at a 20% performance hit? 10%? 5%? 2%?

Thanks.

 

[Caveman]

Right on. I'd love to know the same thing...

 

[urameatball]

I was wondering the same thing...

I'm guessing the difference will be under 5% though... (it's a VERY wild guess)

 

[MajorKong]

Hmmmm. You would think that all these people who pay out the wazoo for terribly over-spec'd memory would have some idea of what they were buying in terms of performance gains. Then again, most people are lemmings.

 

[StraightPipe]

I'm betting it's less than 5 %, but i'd like to see some benchmarks

(i never jumped on the memory bandwagon, my biggest concern is have lots of memory, speed is secondary to that

 

[Ionizer86]

Article

 

[Bovinicus]

I cannot see the difference exceeding 10%. 10% would be in the most memory sensitive applications, and that is still most likely an exaggeration. Games would probably exhibit the largest performance disparity, because they tend to stress more components than other applications. Whatever the performance difference, I have a feeling that it won't be noticeable in real world situations.

Despite the minor performance difference, you shouldn't need ECC memory to have a completely stable system. I run my memory with more aggressive timings than spec and a mildly overclocked CPU, and my computer doesn't crash. It hasn't crashed in an exceedingly long time. The last time it crashed was when I tried using this program called BitTorrent. For some reason my system just doesn't like it. Besides that, I have up times of over 2 weeks.

If you want to maintain stability, make sure you have a case that can move air around well. Also, get a high-end PSU. Other system components shouldn't be skimped on either, but these two components are overlooked more than the motherboard, memory, CPU, etc.

 

[JayMassive]

Originally posted by: MajorKong
Hmmmm. You would think that all these people who pay out the wazoo for terribly over-spec'd memory would have some idea of what they were buying in terms of performance gains. Then again, most people are lemmings.

Hey, lemmings was a great game...well, maybe not. Anyway, I'm stuck on good ol' pc2100 memory, so I don't have a clue, but I've been trying to find information for a while on this and similar topics, and not too many people go into this much depth.

 

[StraightPipe]

I'm with you, lemmings was pretty fun

with you on the 2100 RAM too

i can play most games on the market with maxed details and its still smooth as butter (newest games are FFXI, Battlefield, UT2k3 and i can max settings on all of them with my 2100)

just say no to slide shows

Edit: BTW, for stability, mine is great, it's only crshed windows 1 time in 1 1/2 years, that was due to Musicmatch going nuts.

i usually reboot once a week for updates or a newly installed app, but windows XP seems to have eliminated the stability problems that i used to have with my older boxes (98 boxes). interestingly, when i did an upgrade install from 98toXP my systems got really screwy, so a clean XP install quicky followed and fixed all my problems.

 

[DaveSimmons]

There are a couple of i865/i875 memory-timing articles on the main Anandtech site.