Upgrading ram, should I do it?

X

XViper

Gawd
Joined
Aug 24, 2012
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Ok, so I've been running 4 sticks of 1866 G.Skill ram (16gbs) for as long as I can remember. Since moving a 4930k setup and a tri-fire 290x, this has been left untouched.

Will upgrading the ram to a faster ram show or have any noticeable difference? I've oc'ed my system to 4.5ghz and it won't go any higher. I don't think I need to really push this chip though.
 
Besides bench marking you will see no real world benefit if it from faster memory.
 
What they said. RAM is something that needs to be fast enough, and any faster is a waste. CPUs heavily cache all data. They only actually work on their registers directly, they then have an L1 code and data cache embedded right alone the execution units, and L2 cache adjacent to the core, and a shared L3 cache. These are all WAY faster and lower latency than memory, by orders of magnitude.

So all memory needs to be fast enough to do is to keep the cache full so there's no stalls. Any faster, and it does no good. Intel spec's the RAM speed for its CPUs for a reason, so what they ask for is what they need. More doesn't get you anything useful.

For that particular CPU, 1866 is the max Intel recommends and thus the max that is likely to be at all useful. Even then you'd probably see little, if any, difference going down to 1600.
 
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