What is the advantage of having faster RAM?

[Sheninat0r]

You're going to have to spend >$400 if you want an SSD with over 100GB of space. I have about 120 GB worth of games installed on my current 700GB HDD.

This, is the most expensive SDD money can buy. Almost $4,000!!!!! 😱😱😱

A low capacity SDD could be used to put your OS on. How much space does W7 take up?

You need to read about SSDs and stop saying "OMFG SO EXPENSIVE! LOOK AT THE 1TB SSD NOT MEANT FOR CONSUMER USE! I SAID IT WAS ALMOST $4000 BUT IT'S ACTUALLY $300 LESS!"

They do not die in 1 and a half years. In one of Anand's early articles, they discussed how Intel had engineered their first generation X-25M to last for something like ten years with 5GB of data written per day. Without a pagefile on the drive, I don't think it's easy to write 5GB per day to a disk for years in a row.

SSD prices have fallen steadily for many years in a row now, and the performance they offer is now very much worth the price compared to SSDs. Consider that the absolute best 7200RPM consumer hard disk can do random 4K read/writes at 1-2MB/s, while a contemporary SSD can manage 20-30MB/s. A hard drive's sequential read/write speeds might touch 200MB/s under the most ideal of ideal conditions, but SSDs are bottlenecked by the SATA 3.0 Gb/s specification and have been since their inception; their controllers were designed to limit throughput to SATA 3.0 Gb/s speeds or below, rather than spending chip space on more channels which would not increase speeds

Why do you link to a 1TB SSD if you said yourself you only have 120GB of games, and you only use a 700GB hard drive? People buying SSDs understand that they have small capacity and won't store their music, movies, and documents on it. A 120GB SSD is $300 now, which is a big deal considering the 80GB X-25M was more than that at launch, when I bought one. A 160GB X-25M, big enough for Windows and all of your games with a few GB to spare, is $440 on Newegg.

 

[Voo]

And another person that has no ideas about SSDs (or just likes to spread nonsense who knows)..

Also it's a well known fact that most games don't profit that much from a SSD since we're talking about mostly sequential r/w where the differences are much smaller, so most people would probably NOT install tens of gbs of data for a small benefit on a SSD - obviously other people just get a 160gb drive and don't care about that at all (I've spent more money on books in the last three months than my 160gb Intel drive did cost, so I'd say expensive is relative)

 

[GlacierFreeze]

You're going to have to spend >$400 if you want an SSD with over 100GB of space. I have about 120 GB worth of games installed on my current 700GB HDD.

I saw more than a few SSDs on Newegg that cost less than $400 and had over 100GB capacity. Atleast try to know what you're talking about when arguing. You're sounding like a completely clueless moron. And we don't care about your slow 700GB mechanical drive dinosaur technology. We're talking about new, fast stuff.

URL="http://detonator.dynamitedata.com/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?user=u00000687&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newegg.com%2FProduct%2FProduct.aspx%3FItem%3DN82E16820227500"]This[/URL], is the most expensive SDD money can buy. Almost $4,000!!!!! 😱😱😱

So, what's your fuckin' point? Only businesses would buy it. We're talking desktops, nimrod.

Go troll somewhere else. That or get a clue.

Better yet, go ahead and get a new mobo and DDR3 RAM and be amazed at almost no perceivable difference vs. your current setup so we can laugh at you. Let us know how that $200-300 was put to good use. Sucker born every minute.

 

[alfa147x]

Good iv always wondered this

 

[Fox5]

Faster ram has a point for certain tasks, just the tasks you do are likely not bandwidth limited, so the only benefit from faster ram is lower memory latency. Go check out some server and workstation benchmarks and you'll see where fast ram comes into play.

Or rely on integrated graphics...

 

[Seero]

I use computers to mostly play games. Right now, I have 6GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM. Would I notice any performance increase if I had 6GB DDR3 1600 MHz or faster memory? What is the difference between dual, and tri-channel memory?

Would my games run any faster with memory which is Twice as fast?

What are the main performance advantages of having really fast RAM?

1) Maybe, depends on whether RAM speed is the bottleneck under varies situations.
2) DDR3 has double transfer rate compare to DDR2. However DDR3 is a DRAM interface specification, the actual DRAM is the same. That means, the speed of the RAM is governed by the clock speed and the timing. A DDR2 at 4-4-4-12@800Mhz runs as fast as DDR3 at 4-4-4-12@800Mhz. The different is, DDR3 support 1 more stick, meaning bigger transfer rate. When it comes to gaming, bigger transfer rate does not increase FPS much.

Say you try to drink a cup of water with 2 straws and maximum speed, will I be able to drink faster by adding 1 more straw? In theory, yet, but how even will you SUCK so badly?

3) It depends, as memory is not the mean source of bottleneck most of the time. Your maximum FPS probably won't change as it either bottlenecked by video card, and/or cpu. However, it helps a lot on minimum FPS. Many lag was caused by a data waiting to be processed but can't really get to CPU because data can't get there.

4) When the I/O only occurs between RAM and CPU, then the 2 driving variables are cpu core speed and memory speed. Say your CPU runs at 3Ghz and your RAM runs at 800Mhz(take out the timing to simplify the case), that is a chance that CPU finished processing and are a) unloading data to memory, and b) loading data from memory. Clearly your CPU spent most of the time waiting than doing stuffs. This is why stress program burns your CPU much more than everyday use because the instructions stays within the cache of CPU, reducing the wait of I/O to memory.

Now lets go to some gaming example. Pick World of Warcraft, ICC 25 boss fight. Say your video card is good enough to stay at 60 FPS before the fight, but will drop all the way to 15 FPS during the fight. By doubling the speed of RAM will allow you to acquire 20-30 FPS. That is, from 800Mhz -> 1600Mhz, again timing is excluded in this example to simply the case. However, it doesn't help much to the FPS when you stand at the main town, Dalarin, as the bottleneck here is network and storage due to old players leaving the zone and new players coming in. SSD and a NPU helps more. It also doesn't help with flying around, or lags caused by graphics.

SSD does help increase the minimum FPS too in all the above examples as it has much faster response time. Since the game caps at 2 Gb memory use, not all data are in memory, and therefore need to read off storage. This read are very very small, but everytime it happens, the bridge is block until the storage replies. That means, with SSD along the minimum FPS will increase by 5-10 FPS. Using both will allow you to have 40+ min FPS. That is lag free in terms of FPS.

Note that the old FSB design means all PCIe, storage, network and memory all share the same bus. Anyone of them and cause bottleneck. The new QPI design free memory from sharing bus with others, meaning that it will give better min FPS even with the same RAM speed.

 

[Monkey_Business]

Someone on another forum told me that the i7's only support 1033 MHz DDR3. If you get 1600 MHz RAM it will automatically default down to 1033.

 

[Voo]

Someone on another forum told me that the i7's only support 1033 MHz DDR3. If you get 1600 MHz RAM it will automatically default down to 1033.

The same person that told you that SSDs only live 1 1/2 years? The first i7s officially just supported memory up to 1033MHz (iirc Lynnfield upped that to 1333) which means everything else is run out of specification, which in turn means more or less absolutely nothing. There are enough people who use much higher memory with OCed nehalems and they're fine.. you'll probably get some compatibilty problems if you reach for the stars, but normal 1600MHz memory should be fine.

I'd be more careful about voltage than the speeds of the RAM - that has caused much more problems afaik..

@Seero: You're also completely ignoring the whole memory hierarchy - I'd say it's completely impossible to get anywhere near the improvements you describe just by getting faster RAM. I mean the whole point of cache is to hide memory latencies.. and that usually works rather good. I don't think games are really that latency sensitive.

 

[Seero]

The same person that told you that SSDs only live 1 1/2 years? The first i7s officially just supported memory up to 1033MHz (iirc Lynnfield upped that to 1333) which means everything else is run out of specification, which in turn means more or less absolutely nothing. There are enough people who use much higher memory with OCed nehalems and they're fine.. you'll probably get some compatibilty problems if you reach for the stars, but normal 1600MHz memory should be fine.

I'd be more careful about voltage than the speeds of the RAM - that has caused much more problems afaik..

@Seero: You're also completely ignoring the whole memory hierarchy - I'd say it's completely impossible to get anywhere near the improvements you describe just by getting faster RAM. I mean the whole point of cache is to hide memory latencies.. and that usually works rather good. I don't think games are really that latency sensitive.

I didn't ignore. The size of cache is about 8MB. Stress program utilize it to burn CPU, but than how often cache is being recycled? Cache is very useful, but we can't add more. If we want to talk about cache, than we may as well talk about CPU, but that isn't the scope of the question.

The example was done based on the same video card, cpu and mobo, and the result is this big. Did I mention that the maximum FPS is unchanged? I found this out from OCing my memory. There are differences between 5cls@800 vs 4cls@800 vs 5cls@1066 on minimum FPS. I also didn't mention about the affects of "link and sync" because it also isn't the scope of the question.

 

[Monkey_Business]

I heard that CPU cache has a considerable performance effect on gaming, as well as many other applications.

Processor cache is even arguably more important than clock speed.

The Core 2 Quad Q9650 had 12 MB of L2 cache. While the Core i7 has 8 MB of L3 cache.

 

[Blain]

L2 cache isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Depending on the application, more L2 is beneficial up to a certain point.

When you post any more "I've heard..." or "I read..." statements, please include links so that we can read the same information and judge the source.

We're still waiting on links that give some evidence that "An SSD only lasts about 1 1/2 years on average."

 

[richierich1212]

He's only here for Monkey Business.....🙂

 

[Monkey_Business]

L2 cache isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Depending on the application, more L2 is beneficial up to a certain point.

When you post any more "I've heard..." or "I read..." statements, please include links so that we can read the same information and judge the source.

We're still waiting on links that give some evidence that "An SSD only lasts about 1 1/2 years on average."

Each one of my hard drives lasts less than one year for some reason....

 

[Gigantopithecus]

Each one of my hard drives lasts less than one year for some reason....

That should not be happening. You're killing them. What kind of power supply are you using? Does your case have poor airflow & they're overheating?

 

[Monkey_Business]

That should not be happening. You're killing them. What kind of power supply are you using? Does your case have poor airflow & they're overheating?

I have a Corsair TX750 750W PSU.

My case has minimal airflow. A tiny fan on the back of the case, and a perforated hole on the side of the case. Which the CPU fan uses to suck in air from the outside.

It's micro-ATX OEM case. Here's a photo.

 

[Hacp]

I have a Corsair TX750 750W PSU.

My case has minimal airflow. A tiny fan on the back of the case, and a perforated hole on the side of the case. Which the CPU fan uses to suck in air from the outside.

It's micro-ATX OEM case. Here's a photo.

SSDs last for 18 months? BWuahahahaha.

 

[jimmyparky]

I always need Ram.. 4monitor full of apps.

 

[wiedersehen]

Larger and Faster are both vital!