Which is better...........

thegoonden · 2 Jun 2008 at 08:28

Which configuration gives better performance on DDR3 1600.

1550MHz 6 6 6 18 1T
or
1700MHz 7 7 7 20 2T

Mobo being an a**e about going over about 390MHz clock, and I'm wondering if the tighter timings constitute any kind of payback at all?

Greebo · 2 Jun 2008 at 08:45

Not sure about ddr3 ram but with ddr2 it would be a close thing and the tigher timing setting would be better in some things, the higher memory better in others.

Only you can tell though. Run 3dmark06, superpi and some games and see what difference it makes.

If gaming isn't your thing and it's encoding, try that.

Like I say, it does vary between apps.

thegoonden · 2 Jun 2008 at 08:51

The thing is that I cannot test the higher clock settings on this board (did run the ram at 1750 on my strikerII). The reason I was asking is basically to determine if I should start to spend time trying to work out what the board's bad attitude is due to.
If it's a close call, I probably won't bother, especially since lower clock/higher multi is usually a but easier on the hardware.

I'm right in thinking that 2t/1t is what makes the difference?

thegoonden · 2 Jun 2008 at 10:48

Well, it seems the motherboard relented and let me run the higher fsb test.

test was
440x8 vs 391x9

440x8 didn't allow stock timings on RAM, had to drop to 9 9 9 24 2T for any stability (8 8 8 22 booted but was haphazard).
391x9 allowed 7 6 6 18 1T(can only set first value in BIOS, and I did final timing tweaks with memset).

3dmark06 shows a whole load of bugger all difference, varying by about 40 points, but with the highest going to the low clock high multi, low timing settings.
Aquamark showed a difference of around 6000 points, again in favour of slower and tighter.

On another board (for those who have them), it may be possible to combine the two,by using a different RAM divider, but on the Gigabyte, the next divider down puts the RAM at 1400 or so, which would, overall, be slower, unless timings could be further tightened, but that's doubtful.

Greebo · 2 Jun 2008 at 13:08

There's your answer then - bugger all difference!

Just go with which gives you the best/stable overclock on your cpu.

thegoonden · 2 Jun 2008 at 22:24

Well, the reason I was asking was that the board was being a twit about going to the higher clock lower multi setting.
As usual, as soon as I posted, the problem cleared.
The thread might prove useful for someone else.