Whats with all of the CAS 9 etc.. stuff?

[Justintime]

Admittedly i've not kept abreast of the actual memory technologies lately apart from using it in my builds. However i notice a lot of people getting CAS 9 1600MHz etc.. stuff while i usually go for CAS 6/7 DDR3.. has latencies become a more or less non issue now or am i just willing to spend a little more than avg? I'm usually getting RipjawX 12800 CAS 7 stuff now and used to get loads of 12800 CAS 6 Trident kits until supply seemed to dry up.

 

[Randomface74]

In terms of bang for buck, you just don't get the same return once you go above 1600.

Not really sure what effect CAS has, I imagine there's just a factory churning out CAS 9 really cheaply.

 

[cmndr_andi]

I think it must just be quite a bit cheaper/easier to make CL9 rated memory - so the prices are now rock-bottom. Considering that the performance improvement (in games at least) going from CL9 to CL7 is only a few % FPS then most people just take the hit and spend the extra money on a faster GPU or CPU (which yields much better gaming performance per £).

This article shows the performance difference between different RAM timings and frequencies in modern games an applications using the Sandy Bridge platform.