By how much does memory affect performance?

Tommy B

Tommy B

Tommy B

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Is memory just a case of being a geek and saying "my memory is CAS 2 yours is 2.5" etc or does it actually dramatically affect performance???

Is getting the Gskill HZ CAS2 2GB kit really worth the extra £60 from the GeIL 2GB PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS3?

I mean does the fact that the HZ is CAS2 mean games are going to load twice as fast?
 
My Geil Value will do 2.5-3-3-6 if you raise the voltage by .1, the G-skill i believe might do 2-2-2-5 so the timings you can use aren't dramtically different tbh. however in A64 systems, tight timings are liked a lot, not sure how much of a performance increase there is though, i'm sure someone else will be able to say
 
There is a big perfornace hit + if your cpu is overclocked the better ram is more likely to run at a 1:1 or 5:6 ratio with tight timings, put it this way I've got some cas2 ram but it wont go over 200, so i'm going to upgrade it so I can atleast get it to about 250fsb with tight timings.
 
From what I've seen here, to get higher speeds and tight timings you'll have to spend a lot of money, say, that corsair stuff for over £200 or similar which to me seems a bit of a waste. You'd get more real world performance increase if you saved a bit of money and upgraded the cpu or vidcard. The only time you'll see tangible increases is in benching. This is very noticeable when using 2 gig kits as opposed to 1 gig kits. the tightest timings I've seen at 200mhz with 2gigs is 2-3-2-5-1t, BUT, I've also seen ppl here apparently get timings of 2-2-2-5-1t with 2gig, although I must say I'm a bit sceptical of this but open to be convinced (someone must have managed it by now).
I'm currently at 2-3-2-5-1t @ 208mhz, stock volts, and the performance is not perceptibly different to my old generic memory at the same speed.
 
OK. Well what If I was planning on doing no overclocking.

I'm looking at upgrading to this spec by July:

Athlon 64 X2 4200+
ATI X1900XT
74GB Raptor
2GB Ram (this is what is causing me all the problems)

So is it worth spending big bucks on memory if I'm NOT OVERCLOCKING?
 
As I said, it really depends if you're into benchies or not. if you like high scores in super pi, etc, then go for expensive memory, otherwise some midrange stuff would be perfectly adequate.
Either the Gskill or OCZ pc3200 2gig kits are very good value, run them bith around 200mhz-210mhz (on a divider if needed) and set the timings to 2-3-2-5-1t at stock volts and forget about them. If you've got any dosh left over, then flog your cpu or vid card, get a faster one and you'll see a performance increase and worth the money imho.
 
pieman109 said:
You'd get more real world performance increase if you saved a bit of money and upgraded the cpu or vidcard.
Click to expand...

Spending an extra £60 on your gfx card will make a helluva lot more difference (in games) than spending an extra £60 on RAM.

My recommendation is to get a cheap but known brand (eg Geil Value) 2gig kit, it will be a few percent slower than some of the flashy stuff, but you will get way more performance from a better graphics card. A system with posh RAM and a 7600GT will get annihilated by a system with cheap RAM and a 7800GT when it comes to games.
 
tight timings make a bigger difference than high memory speeds on an a64. As said abouve, spending the extra on a graphics card will see you a far biggerence difference than buy faster ram.
 
Well I'm getting the X1900XT and I aint paying £50 for the extra X when there's about a 20mhz difference between them!

Will I be ok with Geil value then?
 
You need to put things into perspective. Take a step back from all the marketing hype and look at best value for money in my opinion. Geil value is great value, as people mentioned above you will not see a real life difference when playing games for example, if you have CAS 2.5 rather than 2.

I would even take this a step further personally and say that the X1900XT is overkill and way overpriced but thats just me. :)
 
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