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Ram Mhz vs Latency

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dakels

Platinum Member
I remember seeing some sort of benchmark a while ago comparing CL timings vs higher mhz. I cant find this for the life of me.

Basically to answer the question: Is stepping up to say 433mhz, faster overall performance then dropping the latency to say CL2 from CL3 or 2.5?
In what applications do you see performance changes from lower latency or a mhz increase?

Anyone know of a comparison chart? I have looked at some of the examples in Sandra, but it woul dbe nice to see a table. I'm curious as to whether I should go for PC4000 at CL3 or PC3200 at CL2 for 3D, audio, and gaming system. I would assume without a doubt that 4000 will always win over 3200 but what about PC 3500 CL3 over a PC3200 CL2?
 
im not certain but im pretty sure theres some validity to that... im not sure if the performance increase from lower CL would justify a lower mhz speed... in a real-life situation, benchmarks apart, i think you would notice your system being more responsive with lower CL but its hard to tell because you dont mention what you would be increasing to 433mgz from...
 
depends on platform, from a lot of my reading on this topic.

it seems that dual-channel mem intel platforms benefit greatly from higher memory bandwidth even at very loose timings.

amd, with its integrated memory controller, benefit more from cl2 than cl3 latencies as it "sees" system memory as fast cache.

two routes:
buy expensive 2-2-2 and overclock with no looser than 2-3-3 or
buy select 3700/4000 rated mem at cl2.5 offered by few such as mushkin, geil, etc.

 
My philosophy has recently been that bandwidth rules, be it on an AMD or intel platform. I've yet to see any benchmarks that say that a higher clocked, higher latency memory subsystem performs slower than a lower clocked, lower latency one. Remember that in most cases, your memory speed is also tied in some way to your FSB and hence your CPU speed, so when you increase one, you increase both - hence the increase in performance. The converse is also true. You gain a lower latency at the expense of lowering 3 clocks - the memory, the FSB and the CPU. I personally don't feel it's worth it. Besides, low latency memory cost quite a bit more than high bandwidth ones.
 
athlon systems are supposed to benefit more than p4 from low latency, and p4 benefits more from higher frequency. this is because a p4 has a longer pipeline that it needs the bandwidth to keep full.

generally for both systems, gaming performance follows this
frequency>latency> size (as long as you have enough, as in 1.5 GB over 1)

for your money, i think higher bandwidth memory will help more than low latency, but you have to keep in mind that the low latencies can be increased to achieve additional bandwidth
 
Originally posted by: dakels
hmmm... I was under the impression that faster clock of 50mhz+ would always win over a low latency, but this has me thinking.
http://www.pcstats.com/article...ticleid=873&page=2
Click to expand...

From the same folks:
http://www.pcstats.com/article...icleid=1447&page=5

using the same memory,
overclocking fsb to get a higher mem bandwidth offers larger and noticeable performance boost for intel platforms but not for AMD. (reiteration that AMD benefits from lower latencies)

 
Basically, if you are trying to get the biggest performance gain you should look to get even higher frequency RAM. Perhaps 500mhz or more because even though there may be a close call between low latency 400mhz ram and 433mhz ram the performance difference between low latency 400mhz ram and 500+mhz ram will be obvious.
 
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