RAM
Whether you bat for the red team or the blue team
You need it
but there are so many options from 2133 to
4266 megahertz
But could it possibly be worth emptying your wallet for the fastest memory on the market?
Let's find out
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First a primer on RAM
DDR4 is the latest version of the form of DRAM that our computers almost universally use
programs get loaded into it from our SSDs and hard drives because it's
Blazing fast performance is needed to feed our CPUs data to munch on
Turn in those ones and zeros into games
Boring PowerPoint presentations or this video that you're watching right now
Cool, so the faster the RAM the better the performance, right?
Not quite there comes a point where even if you could
Force feed your CPU more data. It couldn't possibly chew through it fast enough to make a difference
so the sweet spot as
Always probably lies somewhere in the middle. We just need to find it
Let's establish a baseline here the joint electron device engineering council or
Jdec for short
specifies
2133 megahertz for DDR4 while on both Intel's Z270 and X99 platforms
Running anything over DDR4 2400 megahertz is outside the official spec
AMD for their part has specified a range of speeds with the most frequently used configuration also sitting at 2400 megahertz
But wait a minute what?
Well, why the heck are companies like G skill?
advertising speeds that are up to
almost double that
Well, the answer is
sanctioned overclocking
Intel's extreme memory profile or XMP for short has become something of an industry standard for running high-end
memory to its rated spec on
supported motherboards
Every RAM module even the highest-end XMP ones then have the Jdec standard speeds baked in then along with that a
faster XMP profile that's stored on a chip that identifies each
Individual module in a standard that's called serial presence detect or SPD
for compatibility reasons Jdec comes first and it's only when you specifically
Enable XMP in your computer's BIOS that it will run at those speeds or at least in theory it will
We've had tons of issues over the years most recently during the Ryzen 7 launch where we couldn't get past
2666 megahertz no matter what ASUS AMD or G skill said
our board with our memory has since been fixed which is great with a firmware update, but
sanctioned overclocking is still overclocking and it can cause
These kinds of issues from chip to chip or board to board or RAM stick to RAM stick depending on your luck
It can also cause less severe
But equally annoying issues to crop up at random at some point in the future
But whatever Linus enough of this warning label crap. I'm prepared to spend a weekend bashing my head
against the wall
Troubleshooting my new gaming rig so tell me what do I stand to gain?
for my pain
Great question. We tested a variety of configurations on AMD the maximum we could achieve was ddr4
3200 and on Intel we hit
3600 megahertz before we just stopped turning the dial because
spoiler alert
Well, no wait actually no you'll see using 2133 megahertz as a baseline
We ran Deus Ex mankind divided and rise of the tomb raider in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12
modes
Some games clearly won't care much about RAM speeds
But others can end up being more memory sensitive than we'd initially expected in for honor
average frame rates looked to be within margin of error regardless of RAM speed, but looking closely er the
97th percentile minimum frame rate does seem to have been affected as far as synthetics go we tested seven zip
The RAM hungry why cruncher Cinebench r15 and ASUS real bench where we had much more
consistent results if by consistent we mean eerily similar across the board
Which leads us then into the price and performance summary in almost every case?
the largest improvement in performance over 2133 is
achieved by 2666
Megahertz then there's another modest improvement when you jump to 3200 and from there
marketing and
purely synthetic benchmarks aside things go downhill pretty quickly on both Intel and
AMD leading us to conclude that there's no point going higher even if you could
So then by 3200 megahertz RAM since that's the sweet spot, right?
well, but shhhhhh
Sure
But it actually depends to what kind of a budget you're working with for your system
If you've already got the best of everything then sure yeah
You might want to go higher on your RAM to eke out that slim improvement
But if you're on any kind of fixed budget well for 64 bucks the difference between 2133 and 3600 RAM
you could go from a core i5 7500 to a
7600 K netting you higher CPU clock speeds and overclocking support or from a Ryzen 5
1500 X to a 1600 X giving you two whole additional processing cores and
That only accounts for the financial investment
What we haven't even talked about is the time that this can end up consuming and going back again to look at the total
possible improvement from a bare bones
J deck 2133 kit to the fastest we tested the full conclusion becomes crystal clear
4.7% for $64 more without any guarantee that it'll actually work means that we wouldn't recommend it
Unless you're out of stuff to spend money on that will give you more meaningful performance or usability
Improvements and you have not only the time and know-how to tinker with it
But also the patience to drop everything and deal with it when something isn't working
And this is especially true if you're using the latest and greatest platform with that
fastest and shiniest RAM
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