it worth the bother of making ram run faster?

mark2410 · 12 May 2015 at 11:28

so i got some more ram, 2400mhz stuff and with 4 dimms in its not playing nice. is it worth bothering to faff about with it or just let it run at slower speed?

mahius · 12 May 2015 at 12:30

The difference in performance is barely noticable. Try running it at the non-OC speeds, should be the 1600Mhz or 1866Mhz ones to see if it works. If so, then there ya go. WOuld be helpful is we had a bit more info, such as what model and how much of it? If its 4x4GB, then I'm frowning. I'd only recommend 2x8GB for 16GB set-ups as most motherboards support dual channel, less hassle. The lack of quad channel support might be an issue? I don't know as I've never run 4 sticks.

tom_e · 12 May 2015 at 12:32

Only really for benchmarks, apart from that in day to day usage you'll notice no real difference.

mark2410 · 12 May 2015 at 14:46

mahius said:
The difference in performance is barely noticable. Try running it at the non-OC speeds, should be the 1600Mhz or 1866Mhz ones to see if it works. If so, then there ya go. WOuld be helpful is we had a bit more info, such as what model and how much of it? If its 4x4GB, then I'm frowning. I'd only recommend 2x8GB for 16GB set-ups as most motherboards support dual channel, less hassle. The lack of quad channel support might be an issue? I don't know as I've never run 4 sticks.

the new sticks are https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-061-TG&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1387 the old sticks are speck wise the same thing but in gold. they were bought some time ago.

its currently all running at 1600MHz.

Admetos · 17 May 2015 at 17:03

Faster memory speed helps more on software that has low ratio of CPU cache hits. Examples of this software, large data compression, video encoding and shared graphics memory.

So unless your encoding videos, or running on-board graphics then faster memory is not worth it.

WesleyBurns · 17 May 2015 at 18:43

Recently I found out that RAM was bottlenecking my SLI setup in games such as Far Cry 3 and a few other games. As I game at 120+ Hz the entire system is under more load and i noticed some scenes i was 'maxed' out at 100 FPS yet both cards where at like 70% usage. I overclocked my ram from 1600 to 2133 (Samsung green which I had not bothered to overclock for years as I didnt have SLI then and a much slower system). The cards now run unrestrained. So unless you have a specific setup where you can prove RAM is the bottleneck, most scenarios / games are no RAM intensive so you don't need fast RAM unless you want to bnechmark. IMHO 2133 Mhz is the sweet spot.

mark2410 · 19 May 2015 at 11:01

i played about with it a little and 2133 wasnt playing well. i think maybe due to no ram profiles for it so it was leaving the timings too tight, so set to 1866 and it seems to be running okay so i think im just going to leave it there, it just doesnt seem worth the pain.