Does RAM speed REALLY matter?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,246 words · ~6 min read
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RAM
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Whether you bat for the red team or the blue team
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You need it
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but there are so many options from 2133 to
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4266 megahertz
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But could it possibly be worth emptying your wallet for the fastest memory on the market?
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Let's find out
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We're opening up a new merch store. You can check out some of our new gear today at the link in the video description
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First a primer on RAM
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DDR4 is the latest version of the form of DRAM that our computers almost universally use
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programs get loaded into it from our SSDs and hard drives because it's
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Blazing fast performance is needed to feed our CPUs data to munch on
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Turn in those ones and zeros into games
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Boring PowerPoint presentations or this video that you're watching right now
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Cool, so the faster the RAM the better the performance, right?
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Not quite there comes a point where even if you could
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Force feed your CPU more data. It couldn't possibly chew through it fast enough to make a difference
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so the sweet spot as
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Always probably lies somewhere in the middle. We just need to find it
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Let's establish a baseline here the joint electron device engineering council or
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Jdec for short
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specifies
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2133 megahertz for DDR4 while on both Intel's Z270 and X99 platforms
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Running anything over DDR4 2400 megahertz is outside the official spec
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AMD for their part has specified a range of speeds with the most frequently used configuration also sitting at 2400 megahertz
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But wait a minute what?
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Well, why the heck are companies like G skill?
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advertising speeds that are up to
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almost double that
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Well, the answer is
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sanctioned overclocking
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Intel's extreme memory profile or XMP for short has become something of an industry standard for running high-end
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memory to its rated spec on
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supported motherboards
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Every RAM module even the highest-end XMP ones then have the Jdec standard speeds baked in then along with that a
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faster XMP profile that's stored on a chip that identifies each
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Individual module in a standard that's called serial presence detect or SPD
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for compatibility reasons Jdec comes first and it's only when you specifically
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Enable XMP in your computer's BIOS that it will run at those speeds or at least in theory it will
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We've had tons of issues over the years most recently during the Ryzen 7 launch where we couldn't get past
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2666 megahertz no matter what ASUS AMD or G skill said
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our board with our memory has since been fixed which is great with a firmware update, but
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sanctioned overclocking is still overclocking and it can cause
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These kinds of issues from chip to chip or board to board or RAM stick to RAM stick depending on your luck
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It can also cause less severe
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But equally annoying issues to crop up at random at some point in the future
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But whatever Linus enough of this warning label crap. I'm prepared to spend a weekend bashing my head
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against the wall
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Troubleshooting my new gaming rig so tell me what do I stand to gain?
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for my pain
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Great question. We tested a variety of configurations on AMD the maximum we could achieve was ddr4
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3200 and on Intel we hit
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3600 megahertz before we just stopped turning the dial because
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spoiler alert
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Well, no wait actually no you'll see using 2133 megahertz as a baseline
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We ran Deus Ex mankind divided and rise of the tomb raider in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12
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modes
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Some games clearly won't care much about RAM speeds
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But others can end up being more memory sensitive than we'd initially expected in for honor
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average frame rates looked to be within margin of error regardless of RAM speed, but looking closely er the
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97th percentile minimum frame rate does seem to have been affected as far as synthetics go we tested seven zip
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The RAM hungry why cruncher Cinebench r15 and ASUS real bench where we had much more
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consistent results if by consistent we mean eerily similar across the board
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Which leads us then into the price and performance summary in almost every case?
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the largest improvement in performance over 2133 is
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achieved by 2666
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Megahertz then there's another modest improvement when you jump to 3200 and from there
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marketing and
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purely synthetic benchmarks aside things go downhill pretty quickly on both Intel and
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AMD leading us to conclude that there's no point going higher even if you could
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So then by 3200 megahertz RAM since that's the sweet spot, right?
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well, but shhhhhh
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Sure
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But it actually depends to what kind of a budget you're working with for your system
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If you've already got the best of everything then sure yeah
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You might want to go higher on your RAM to eke out that slim improvement
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But if you're on any kind of fixed budget well for 64 bucks the difference between 2133 and 3600 RAM
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you could go from a core i5 7500 to a
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7600 K netting you higher CPU clock speeds and overclocking support or from a Ryzen 5
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1500 X to a 1600 X giving you two whole additional processing cores and
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That only accounts for the financial investment
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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
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possible improvement from a bare bones
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J deck 2133 kit to the fastest we tested the full conclusion becomes crystal clear
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4.7% for $64 more without any guarantee that it'll actually work means that we wouldn't recommend it
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Unless you're out of stuff to spend money on that will give you more meaningful performance or usability
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Improvements and you have not only the time and know-how to tinker with it
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But also the patience to drop everything and deal with it when something isn't working
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And this is especially true if you're using the latest and greatest platform with that
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fastest and shiniest RAM
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Which in many cases allows you to use services that would otherwise be geo blocked
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Another cool thing is that your ISP can't track exactly what it is that you're doing online
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Tunnel bear has a top rated privacy policy and you can try it for free with 500 megabytes and no
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Credit card required and you can get 10% off by going to tunnel bear dot com slash LTG
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So thanks for watching guys if this video sucked
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You know what to do
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But if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in
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The video description also down there is our merch store which I own hurt
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Which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join