RAM speed

JCgames · Jan 19, 2021

I've never been all that into faster ram speeds for the most part. I got solid ram with the amount i need and never really thought past that. But i need to buy new ram and was looking at the prices, it's a 20 dollar difference between the slowest and the fastest, and it goes in steps of around 4-5 dollars.

It got me thinking about how much of a difference is between the 2600 and 3600, or the middle road 3000.

In the past i've seen numbers that were around 1% difference which to me means i would not even notice it. Is this still true? The tiny difference in price right now makes me think if i'm already spending 155, what's 175, but at the same time i wonder would i even notice?

Thoughts on this?

Boon72 · Jan 20, 2021

apparently 3200 is the sweet spot for ram in both Intel & AMD camps, i would go for the one you can afford around that mark, various articles have different thoughts on ram speed but as you say there's little to really notice if you go for the middle.

Kaamos_Llama · Jan 20, 2021

It depends on the platform (Ryzen, Intel) too, as well as the timings not just the bandwidth.

In games that are bottlenecked by the CPU you will generally find that faster RAM improves minimum frame times by a small amount. The other thing is most games are not bottlenecked by the CPU so you don't notice. Basically faster RAM is slightly better for gaming, but its really not worth paying a huge premium for.

It's been explored lots of times.