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Can someone explain RAM timing to me?

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pahina22

Registered
Joined
May 27, 2011
I will be getting 8GB DDR3 1600 RAM. I was looking as different kinds and it seems that changes in the timing increases the price can jump up quite a bit. What are the differences when the timing is 9-9-9-24 compared to 8-8-8-24?

I have also seen overclocking videos where they change the timing of the RAM. Is it viable to get RAM with one timing and change it to another? If it does make that much of a difference.
 
Sure.

The difference between 9-9-9-24 and 8-8-8-24 is academic, unless you are benchmarking. You will most likely not notice any difference in real word performance.

Ram rating is only that - a rating. Depending on the options available with your motherboard, you can change its frequency and timings to anything you want - the voltage, frequency, and quality of the ram modules are what determines which settings will actually work. If you lower the frequency, you can usually run faster timings. If you slow down the timings, you can usually run higher frequency.

So for example, if a pair of sticks is rated at DDR3 1600 9-9-9-24 at 1.5V, it is pretty likely that they will run DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24 at 1.65V. Those are just numbers out of the air, but often times they hold true, other times they wouldn't.

For a daily driver, I don't tweak ram settings. If I'm benchmarking, I know exactly what frequency and timings the memory maxes out on for each specific benchmark - in that situation, finishing a benchmark in 12 minutes and 5 seconds can mean a much better ranking than finishing it in 12 minutes and 10 seconds. In the real world, a .007% performance difference isn't noticeable.

In my opinion, a lot of people overpay for the hot gamer ram when they don't intend to do anything but run the stock frequencies and timings - and it makes very little difference to anything as far as performance. I'd save an extra couple bucks and buy some better fans, with better cooling you might get more frequency out of your CPU or GPU, and that will make a much bigger difference to most people.
 
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