I just bought performance RAM for the first time in my life

[AAA]

I just bought this yesterday night:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231194

I think i would get slightly better performance than having 4-4-4-12 timings, right? I read around and everyone's is talking about their "personal preference" for tighter timings and prefer the 4 for latency, and I can't help but feel like doubting my decision.

What exactly the does speed (MHz) do for the performance, because people are talking like timings are more important, which I kind of understand. :ohdear: help.

[Warsaw]

My timings are 2. :realsmug:

Speed is how many operations you get in a second. The latency cuts down on the time it takes that data to travel. So, the faster the speed, the more time it takes that extra data to travel. After a certain point, it's better to have lower latencies, and on the other hand, it's better to have a decent speed and not sacrifice it all to have lower latencies.

[/oversimple explanation]

[AAA]

Thank You,.... I think.

... So, what I bought is a little better than 800MHz 4-4-4-12?

[Cortexian]

I'm running 8GB's at 5-5-5-15/800Mhz and it's pretty damn fast...

[Amit]

I'm running 8GB's at 5-5-5-15/800Mhz and it's pretty damn fast...

Maybe a couple performance tests might help. A benchmark of the 8GB RAM and then take out 4GB of RAM and test it again. I assume this guy bought his 2x2GB of RAM to replace his old modules.

[Phopojijo]

I just bought this yesterday night:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231194

I think i would get slightly better performance than having 4-4-4-12 timings, right? I read around and everyone's is talking about their "personal preference" for tighter timings and prefer the 4 for latency, and I can't help but feel like doubting my decision.

What exactly the does speed (MHz) do for the performance, because people are talking like timings are more important, which I kind of understand. :ohdear: help.That's a loaded question...

Latency is the delay from a request to a delivery. Timings (along with other factors) determines the bandwidth of data coming through the RAM... typically in Gigabytes per Second these days.

Companies have been really unfocusing on latency these days because Intel and AMD's modern CPUs require so much bandwidth to be pumped into them. While, yes, you can run CPU and Memory at different frequencies these days -- on the whole high bandwidth RAM is preferred because that feeds the processor... which has quite huge caches these days... and the faster that the CPU pumps data, the quicker the videocards will get them -- and the videocards have their own RAM anyway so you don't care about them.

I'm not saying that latency is unimportant... just that people heavily focus on big fat bandwidths to pump their hoggish components with data... and let their cache deal with being low-latency. Obviously that's a problem if what you want ISN'T in anyone's cache... but yeah...

As for low latency RAM... typically manufacturers rebrand higher-bandwidth RAM as lower bandwidth (why make 4 models if you can make 1 and respec it 3 times)...

***********************

So long story short -- lower latencies will help you quite a bit... but Intel, AMD, and to a lesser extent nVidia typically makes their parts (these days) to just want huge frickin' highways between their components... the faster the better. (Up to the point the motherboard, processor, or RAM can't take it of course)