DDR4 Memory Speed Question

D

DFinan

Weaksauce
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Jul 2, 2004
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I have always wondered this, but how much of a performance difference does the faster memory make? For example if I have DDR4 2666 vs DDR4 3200 (assume the case is the lowest you can get for each speed). How much of a performance improvement would I see. More importantly would it be a noticeable improvement?

Thanks for any info, always been curious about this.
 
Spartacus09 said:
Performance for what purpose? Gaming, video encoding, photo editing, ACAD?
Click to expand...
Gaming would be the major thing. I just dont know that for conventional use (not doing video editing, photo editing or acad) it probably doesnt make a difference. Was curious more then anything else.
 
Depends on the CPU. You will see more benefit using faster ram with a Ryzen cpu. That said, I was looking at benchmarks comparing 2666 ram with cl14 3200 ram, and most games showed less than a 5% FPS difference on average.

Sure there was a performance increase. But not enough for me to pay double.
 
Most games are GPU bottlnecked with current GPU but when res is lowered to reduce GPU bottlneck 2666c15 to 3200c14 shows up to 10% improvement to CPU performance with Intel While Ryzen would see larger gains up to this point before soon hitting a wall Intel continues to scale with 4400c8 being up to 24% faster.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ram-speed,5951-5.html

So if you play one of the few CPU heavy games out there it can make a noticeable difference especially when combined with the performance gain from overclocking the CPU which on it''s own often provides less performance than overclocking the RAM.
But for most games out there the only thing that makes a real difference is a faster GPU especially at high resolution as a higher resolution does not increase load on the CPU just GPU.
 
Thanks for the information everyone, its kind of what I was expecting to hear, but never miss an opportunity to learn something new. Intresting to find out that the Ryzen processors work better with faster memory. Thanks for that tid bit. My new system should be up and running this time next week. Was holding off on memory until I made sure I wasnt hamstringing my self going with the 2666 memory instead of springing for the 3200
 
2666 and 3000c15\3200c16 often cost about the same amount but with Intel you need a overclockable MB Z390 to go over 2666.
Also avoid 2666c17\18\19
 
The difference would be negligible, and as always, you would have to make a big hardware upgrade (from older ddr2 or ddr3) to really "feel" something, given you will upgrade the CPU, GPU and all.
My previous system was Athlon X2 with DDR2 and when I upgraded I was kind of over-expecting a very major increase in performance for my activity. I was a bit disappointed :) . IPC and overall advances in technology/memory turned out to be not that big as I expected (I was a bit out of the loop for several years, maybe that's the reason for my exaggerated expectations). Maybe converting from HDDs to SSDs was the biggest upgrade I ever did and felt the most. Of course for heavy activities like compressing (WinRAR, 7Z) or encoding (X264/5) the difference is very tangible. That said, if both memories are the same CL, 2666 or 3200, you would see some seconds improvement in a long compression run for example. The question is how often you do these kind of things. The price being very close, I would again go for 3000 or 3200 memory at least.
 
Another ram article on Toms showed the difference between bog standard 2133 to the 3500+ range was 5% at best. Seemed to average around 2-3%. As mentioned, find the best value 3000 and you are set.

What a waste of life that was.
 
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