Is DDR$ slower than DDR3?

snadge

snadge

snadge

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Someone once told me that they didnt go for a DDR4 memory system setup because of the latency (and therefore the memory would be slower) - he went for a DDR3 Dual Channel system instead and overclocked it, this was on a top spec system, I may be wrong...but wouldn't it be wiser to get DDR4 Quad Channel memory and lower the timings a little if possible? - that way you have more bandwidth to the memory

edit: so my question is: is DDR4 (quad) slower on X series than DDR3 (dual) on Z series?

thanks
 
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Possibly at the time you were told/read this. Ddr4 in quad channel was limited to the high end X series Intel chipset. Whilst dual channel ddr3 was on the mainstream Z platform. Now though with the arrival of skylake on Z series, ddr4 is available on it but again its dual channel only.
 
No I was aware, the person wanted to build "the ultimate gaming machine" and he didnt mention that he couldn't afford or didn't want the X series, I just asked why he didnt go for a quad channel (as he already had a top end dual channel machine) and that was his answer

so my question is: is DDR4 (quad) slower on X series than DDR3 (dual) on Z series?
 
snadge said:
...so my question is: is DDR4 (quad) slower on X series than DDR3 (dual) on Z series?
Click to expand...

Depends what you are building that system for. If l was building a gaming/general purpose machine, l wouldn't be bothered with the quad channel RAM system. For video editing workstation or other apps that benefit from the extra memory bandwidth the quad channel DDR4 RAM would be useful.
 
snadge said:
No I was aware, the person wanted to build "the ultimate gaming machine" and he didnt mention that he couldn't afford or didn't want the X series, I just asked why he didnt go for a quad channel (as he already had a top end dual channel machine) and that was his answer

so my question is: is DDR4 (quad) slower on X series than DDR3 (dual) on Z series?
Click to expand...

That's extremely hard to answer. There are going to be some cases where the DDR4 would be slower. But I would think not many. If you had a CPU with very little cache that would increase the value proposition of low latency against bandwidth, and depending on what the task is, that will affect your priorities. But I would have thought it to be a significantly less common case. If you're talking about gaming, I would have thought the increased bandwidth has much greater value than the low latency. Copying all those contiguous blocks of textures, et al. Bandwidth for me, please. And the faster that RAM clocks, the less it gets anyway. I would say your friend was probably the victim of "a little knowledge being a dangerous thing" - knew enough to understand that DDR4 quad isn't necessarily better than DDR3 dual and is case specific, but didn't know their use case in enough detail to say that it was. (Though who knows, it's possible they did but I think you'd have to have a really, really good understanding of exactly how your games were working to be able to say you gained more from the slightly lower latency).

Either way however, it is quite rare for memory speed to be a significant factor in performance. Most modern systems, RAM is way down the list of bottlenecks.

All in my semi-educated understanding. Someone else may come along and correct me.
 
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