Cas latency

My instructor in my A+ certification course told me today that he built a PC that MaximumPC built, replicating it completely. He then ran benchmarks and found his system was running 40% lower than the MaximumPC system. He found out he was running bad ram supposedly with a cas latency of 4 or 5. (Kingston Valueram, which I am running in several of my boxes!!!) and upgraded to new ram, which lowered the cas latency to 2. Then his speed became just as the Maximum Pc. Is the difference in memory bandwidth really that great? If it is, I no longer will be buying the Kingston Valueram, thats for sure.

I thought that Ram bandwidth was *not that* important. I thought the difference between pc133 and DDR was only about 10 percent! I didnt think going from cas 2 to cas 3 ram did much of a performance hit either. I guess I need to start reading up some more.....

There is a big difference between running cas 4 or 5 vs. cas 2.
The difference is not as great as cas 2 to cas3.
If you have a motherboard that dosen't allow you to manually choose the cas settings then you are at the mercy of what the memory's spd is set at.
A lot of memory rated cas3 will run fine at cas2 of course some won't.