IS THE RAM'S CLOCK SPEED IMPORTANT?

What the Benchmarks Are Saying About RAM

Steve Smith talks about the importance of DDR4 DIMM Clock speeds, or lack thereof judging from the benchmarks, themselves.

Episode #8-01 released on August 26, 2017

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The Ram's clock speed is something that has only some importance to our everyday lives. This is especially true considering that RAM is normally the fastest kind of memory a computer has, other than the cache onboard the CPU.

The current standard of RAM, DDR4, operates before overclocking at anywhere between 800mhz and 2133mhz, making most DIMMs we buy effectively a 2133mhz RAM module. RAM advertised at higher speeds are overclocked and require the BIOS to have XMP profiles to be overclocked with relative ease for even the most novice of users.

Now the question was how important is the RAM's Clock speed? And, in truth, the important of it is very little. I've include in the sources of my episode a link to Tech Buyers Guru benchmark between 2133, 2666, and 3200MHZ, and you see that there is a very minimal difference between the three clock speeds of RAM in various games. And, counter intuitively the higher clocked RAM sometimes performs worse than the slower speeds. We tend to believe that faster parts in a computer will result in a better experience, but it is the balancing of the entire computer that is effectively more important. Opting for a hard drive instead of a SSD can undermine a computer's speed, using slow RAM, too. A slow CPU can, also, bottleneck a computer, and an underpowered graphics card can, also, hinder the experience.

So, what I am saying is this, faster RAM won't make your experience noticeably better, but using slower components, will make the experience noticeably worse.

Host : Steve Smith | Music : | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Dot Net

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