RAM choice

[Cand3r]

I don't know whether to go for high clock speed or low CAS. Board is ddr2 800 to 1200 standard. Think Ive narrowed it to 800 w/ 3 CAS lat or 1066 w/ 5. Any help would be great.

Thank You
Travis

 

[Smartazz]

Are you overclocking and are you using Intel or AMD?
edit: Are you planning to game on your system as well?

 

[Cand3r]

i might overclock. using an intel e6600 for gaming

 

[Smartazz]

If you're planning to over clock a lot, then get the faster RAM, but tighter timed RAM is better for gaming(not much though). I'd prefer the faster RAM personally.

 

[Lemon law]

I am somewhat amazed that this question gets answers in the form of opinions. There are a plethora of free and paid benchmarking programs that can output answers in the form of hard numbers.---and with slower ram and tighter memory timings I can a memory transfer speed of of X/bytes a second and with faster ram and looser timings I get Y/bytes a second. There are people who have done the experiment and its those people we need to hear from.

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: Lemon law
---and with slower ram and tighter memory timings I can a memory transfer speed of of X/bytes a second and with faster ram and looser timings I get Y/bytes a second.

Oh, if it were only that simple. The answer to the OP's question is a big "it depends".

Very few people actually ask, much less find the answer to that question, though I can't see how you would pick memory without knowing the answer.

This won't be much help, but with DDR memory 1 CAS number (i. e. 3-->2) is generally equivalent to about 20-30mhz. CAS2 DDR400 is about equal in performance to CAS3 DDR450, for DDR2...????

If there was a hard and fast answer, there would be one single brand/model of memory that would be the best.

"I don't know whether to go for high clock speed or low CAS."...and then throw overclocking into the mix and it gets really confusing.

The best place to start is as you suggest, benchmark results, finding someone somewhere that has the same memory, running at the speed h wants with the latencies he wants will be difficult to find though.

A better place to look may be the review forums.

 

[Phlargo]

I recently was faced with this exact question and did a fair amount of benchmarking using 3dMark (I know, not perfect - but at least repeatable and definitely comparable to itself) and what I found was this.

Adding 50 mhz to CPU clock (FSB) mattered far more than changing ram timings. I went back and forth between ~900 with low timings to ~1100 with very loose timings. I found that the tighter timings resulted in a higher score, smoother framerate and slightly cooler temperature.

My final everyday settings (I don't want to run at max overclock 24/7) for my E6300/ASUS P5B Deluxe/Crucial Ballistix 8500 are

Core clock: 3150 mhz @ 1.24V
FSB: 450 mhz
DDR2: 900 mhz 4/4/3/7 @ 2.20V