Does faster RAM really help gaming performance?

[Jak3 Mac]

I was thinking of buying "Kingston HyperX Beast 8GB" while it's on sale and selling my old 1600 Mhz Crucial Ballistix Sport but is it worth it? Would it improve performance at all in games? I have an i5 4670k @ 4 Ghz and a Z87-K at the moment if that helps, just got a new R9 280X too. I think it would be worth it because I would probably break even in the end


Thanks in advance

 

[wazza300]

I doubt you'd see any difference tbh,maybe 2-3 fps more

if its not too much hassle selling ect then do it otherwise your not missing much

 

[ShivP]

^ Not really much point

 

[troops]

Oh the upgrade itch.

 

[Sliver]

Not worth the upgrade. You'll only see a difference in benchmarks and even then it won't be much.

 

[NoNameNoNumber]

I couldn't spot any gains in benchmarks when I OC'd my 1600MHz RAM to 1900+

That's on Sandy though, I hear that Haswel likes ram speed

 

[dfour]

it will still be a negligible amount and not worth the outlay. I keep getting tempted by the nice 2400 kingston but have to remind myself of the sideways move it will be.

You would be better off spending the money on a creative sb Z sound card if you game a lot than the ram IMHO.

 

[Jak3 Mac]

Oh the upgrade itch.

Pretty much

Thanks guys, won't be upgrading

 

[Doogles]

Not much point but if I had free postage I would get some just for the 16GB lol.

 

[Jak3 Mac]

Not much point but if I had free postage I would get some just for the 16GB lol.

Only 172 posts to go I got free shipping because I've been a member for 2 years, it's great

 

[Rroff]

Post I previously made about it:

Did a few quick benchmarks of the opening scene of BF4.

The difference between running my RAM at 2133MHz XMP (11-12-12-30 - sub-timings 8/171/48 type numbers) and 2133 9-10-10-21 with sub-timings down to 6/125/24 type numbers (best of 3 runs each):

Min 72, Max 138, Avg 96.790
Min 72, Max 139, Avg 97.124

Had a few plays with bumping up the frequency a bit to its out the box 2400MHz profile (numbers pretty much identical to the XMP settings), even dropping back to 1600MHz speeds only saw the min drop back to 69 and max to 128 (only did one run) with hardly any change to the average. (all the rest of the runs were bang on 72 min so that 1600 dropped to 69 probably shows a very slight effect from memory performance there).

From what I've seen you really only see fair gains from increased frequency when your talking 2+ high end GPUs (and/or more than 4 real CPU cores) in a seriously overclocked system - once your upto 1866MHz on a 4 core i5/i7 (ignoring HT) and single GPU theres significantly diminishing returns for gaming from higher speed RAM.

(Most of what I've seen is limited to ivy-e and haswell though - might not be true over all AMD platforms, other Intel CPUs/platforms. etc.)

 

[LtMatt]

In some instances (Multi Gpu, cpu limited areas) yes it does make a big difference.

2700k 4.4ghz

1600mhz 9-9-9-27-2T - stock seconds

290 crossfire @975/1250 stock

2700k 4.4ghz

2133mhz 9-10-10-21-1T - tight seconds

290 crossfire @975/1250 stock

2700k 5.27ghz

2133mhz 9-10-10-21-1T - tight seconds - BCLK 102.5

290 Crossfire 975/1250 stock

Spoiler