DDR 1600 vs faster ram?

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XViper

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I currently have 4 sticks of 4GB @ 1600. G.Skill ram that came out of my 1155 board that is now in my 2011 board.

Do I need to get some faster ram to fully utilize my 2011 board? My rig is in my sig.

Should I get some 2133 ram? Will I notice any speed increase?
 
I tried running it at 1866 and it occasionally causes BSODs. I might have to up the voltage.
 
XViper said:
I tried running it at 1866 and it occasionally causes BSODs. I might have to up the voltage.
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Why not just leave it at 1600? We're not in the days of the Celeron 300A. You won't even notice the RAM OC unless you're doing some pretty specific memory-intensive stuff. At all. All you'll be doing is making your system less stable.
 
I upgraded from 16GB of DDR3 1600 or 16GB of DDR3 at 2400.

After adjusting the speed and timings I ran a series of benchmarks in several games and saw absolutely no performance increases.

That was going from 1600 to 2400. If you're having isses at 1866 I say put it back to 1600 and don't worry about it!
 
XViper said:
The XMP Profile 1 makes it run at 1866. Should I leave it at that?
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Really? It was sold as 1600MHz but has an XMP profile for 1866MHz? That's kind of odd. Maybe it's supported then. You can try it. I wouldn't put in a super ton of effort, though, because the gains will be none to minimal.
 
Leave it at 1600 unless it's stable at the XMP 1866 setting...you're not going to notice a difference anyway with an Intel system. If you were running an AMD APU with IGP only, that would be a different story.
 
Thanks guys. I'm able to overclock a bit higher with 1600. With 1866, I would have to dial the overclock back a bit.
 
dandragonrage said:
You should definitely get more RAM, but most workloads won't see a noticeable performance increase with >1600MHz RAM. If the price is pretty much the same then go for it, but if 1600MHz is a good $10+ cheaper, I'd stick with it, unless you're really taxing your system with memory-intensive applications.

I'd recommend buying 2x4GB or 2x8GB, giving you the options of 8GB, 12GB, 16GB or 20GB of RAM, depending on whether you use the new stuff along with your existing stuff. Depending on your motherboard and the configuration of your BIOS, a mixed-RAM config may or may not work. My mixed-RAM 24GB config has worked perfectly in 2 of my last 3 boards, and worked only when downclocked from 1600MHz to 1333MHz on the third motherboard.
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He has 16GB.

Op, as pointed out, higher speed than 1600MHz wont get you much.
I've seem reports that some AMD CPUs do see a decent benefit with faster ram when running BF4.

I changed from 4GB @ 1600MHz to 8GB @ 2200MHz and cant tell the difference except when pushing more than 4GB (due to lack of memory, not memory speed).
Using a clocked 2500K.
 
Overclocked memory is pretty much all marketing, the synthetic gains are almost 0, little lone the real world ones.

If you can get overclocked memory for the same price there's no reason not to, but otherwise there's not really a reason to go above whatever the highest stock memory speed the board operates on.
 
hehe, it was a just in case comment :p
It made me smile.
 
Pabuchok said:
I upgraded from 16GB of DDR3 1600 or 16GB of DDR3 at 2400.

After adjusting the speed and timings I ran a series of benchmarks in several games and saw absolutely no performance increases.

That was going from 1600 to 2400. If you're having isses at 1866 I say put it back to 1600 and don't worry about it!
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thanks for your post. i'm on 16 gb of 1600 ram and wondering too if selling it and buying 2400 would be a good idea. ok i'll stay with my ddr 1600.
 
I currently don't see many reasons for the average pc user to have more than 8gb of ram. I have been using 8gb ram for years and have never seen anything that held me back because I didn't have enough ram. If you already have 16gb why do you feel you need to upgrade? You didn't list any reasons why you would need more ram except to fully utilize your board. Having large amounts of ram only seems to make sense for 3 reasons:

1) You are using ramdisk

2) You are running VMs

3) You are running a server

Just stick with your current setup and if you see a real reason to get more ram then buy it when the prices aren't so ridiculous.
 
Reading the thread title usually helps to understand the topic.
 
I've been running 8 gig of Crucial Ballistix 1600 @ 2000 since Feb 2013 and I'm very happy with the performance it gives me. I bought another 8 gig last fall but it wouldn't overclock past 1866 so I put it in my dads PC I just built for him and run it @ 1600. I'm happy with 2000mhz ram though in reality it probably doesn't really give much more performance than 1600.
 
XViper said:
I currently have 4 sticks of 4GB @ 1600. G.Skill ram that came out of my 1155 board that is now in my 2011 board.

Do I need to get some faster ram to fully utilize my 2011 board? My rig is in my sig.

Should I get some 2133 ram? Will I notice any speed increase?
Click to expand...

So the FSB and mem frequency run pretty hand in hand, bumping up the speed, means you usually have to relax the latency/timing and increase voltage. If you are OC'ing the CPU a RAM OC usually helps (I'm talking benching to actually see the difference) but like dandragonrage said it's not like you need to eek out as much performace you can out of an i7, there are BEEFY :D
 
I'd be more inclined to sell the 4930k, buy another, and hope it clocks higher than 3.9 than upgrade to faster ram on that rig. Of course that's assuming you actually tried to dial it up higher than 3.9 and hit a wall. You barely see a difference from fast ram on 1155 and 1150 machines, and you have 1.5 cores to feed per channel instead of 2. I wouldn't bother changing your ram unless you have an actual use for more ram. If you need more I figure you'll probably know it. 32+ is usually professional or serious amateur/hobbyist use. Programming, video editing, etc. In my case I upgraded to 64GB after running out of memory writing server apps with 32GB.
 
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There was a surprise there at 1080p, Thief.
A 12% increase going from DDR3 1600 CL9 to DDR 3 2933 CL12.
Apart from that, there is little point in spending extra on faster ram for gaming on Haswell (and I imagine SB and IB).
It would be interesting to see if there are any other games that can see a small benefit.

I went the cheap but effective route of buying 8GB Kingston HyperX Predator 2400MHz CL11 ram (on a clocked SB 2500K).
I havent found it to be any better than my old 4GB G-Skill 1600 CL6 on anything I was using at the time and on some of my long standing benchmarks, just better because I now have 8GB.
 
After reading a few quality reviews of ram speed scaling with Hazwell, and swapping my "old" 1600mhz c9 from for some new stuff - I think 2400mhz ram at cas 10 or better is the sweet spot.
 
I would say the sweet spot is DDR3 1866. Although that depends on what applications you run.
 
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