Did I buy the wrong memory?

[ag_dewey]

I upgraded my rig back in January, with a bundle from OCUK, consisting of an Asus Maximus VII Ranger and a Core i7 4790K. At the time, DDR3 memory prices were higher than they are now, and I had to go for the cheapest option, in order to get the 16GB I desired, within my budget. Now I'm wondering if I made the wrong decision, and should have spent a bit more on a faster kit.

I bought two lots of the 'Avexir Core Blue Series 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit'. I didn't do much research at the time, as I didn't think memory speed and timings would have much effect, unless I wanted to overclock my CPU. I've since seen it suggested that faster speeds are better with Haswell CPUs, and that the timings are more important than I thought. On top of this, running 4 sticks of RAM puts more stress on the IMC, and can lead to slower overall speeds.

I also noticed the timings of the memory are wrong on the product page, as they are listed as 11-11-11-24 at 1600MHz, whereas the SPD is programmed to 11-11-11-28. I attempted to run the memory at lower timings of 9-9-9-24, but immediately ran into errors when running Memtest86.

I really wanted my new rig to be as future proof as possible, hence wanting 16GB of RAM, but now I'm worred that the memory speed is going to have a detrimental effect in the future, especially in applications that are memory intensive.

Are memory speeds and timings really that important in every day use, or are they just for people who want the best benchmark scores? Please put my mind at rest !

 

[ag_dewey]

Those timings are pretty abysmal for ram that's only rated at 1600mhz. Normally 1600mhz would be around cas 9. I wouldn't have touched them with a bargepole. One thing to put your mind at rest though, Haswell has no problems running 4x sticks of ram. I didn't even have to increase any voltages for mine.

I was afraid you were going to say that! I wish I had done some more research and spent a bit more, as I want everything to run the best it can. I'll see if I can lower the timings with some more voltage on the memory, as it's listed as supporting 1.50-1.60V on the product page, and is currently running at 1.50.

 

[ag_dewey]

Thanks for all the replies guys. I did notice that the standard memory sets from most manufacturers are C11, with the lower timings reserved for the performance models.

I upped the memory voltage to 1.60V, and changed the timings to 9-9-9-24-1T, but I was getting memory errors straight away in Memtest86. I changed back to 2T, and everything was stable, so now I'm going to try lowering the voltage slightly.