Gadgetory

Corsair RM series power supplies are optimized for silent operation click now to learn more I get asked so often - what Ram should I get what speed ram should I get what capacity Ram should I get so capacity is pretty simple that's how many things you can have going at the same time so you look at your current system how much RAM you have how much your utilization is how much more would you like to be able to utilize there you go if you're not using professional applications like you know DaVinci Resolve and After Effects and Premiere all at the same time you're probably good with anywhere from 8 to 16 gigs of RAM for quite a while now when it gets into speed things get quite a bit more complicated because it's phenomenally confusing for people who don't know much about Ram speed there's frequency which will go anywhere on ddr3 from around 1333 all the way up to 3000 megahertz and then there's Layton sees which are different ok so frequency predominantly affects the maximum band widths so that's how much data can be transferred to and from it at a time whereas latency predominantly affects how quickly it can respond to a request so these two things can affect performance in different applications in different ways however how much they affect things there you might be surprised that it really isn't as much as you might expect so what we decided to do is we took some high-performance ddr3 2.4 gigahertz memory so that's 20 400 megahertz memory and we ran it at 800 megahertz ok we run it at 1333 mega Hertz 1600 megahertz at what I'd consider to be a typical casa latency 9 2 CL 9 1600 at CL 8 so you tend to pay a little bit of a premium for a CL 8 kit versus a 1600 kit 1866 and then for good measure at 2400 megahertz then what we did is so we ran two games as well as Cinebench just to give you some idea how it runs in games versus synthetics so here you can see the graph in front of me which basically goes okay well if you're looking at the same capacity Ram running all these different applications and different speeds you're looking at not a whole lot of difference in performer because what often happens with higher bandwidth so that is higher frequency Ram is that it tends to sacrifice latency and then as you tighten up Layton sees you tend to sacrifice the maximum frequency to the point where they actually cancel each other out a lot and you end up spending more money for higher frequency Ram that might look better on paper but doesn't really deliver much in terms of a better performance you know number in the real world even our ddr3 800 which you can actually can't really buy we couldn't even find that even our ddr3 800 isn't really so much slower that it's going to make a difference so with that said let's bring up the next graph which is the amount the number of dollars you're paying per FPS we took our gaming benchmarks and we graphed how much it's costing you per FPS because the frames per second didn't really change the performance didn't change much suspending more was basically just spending more and there are reasons why you might want better memory so for example if you like the aesthetic of a particular Ram kit versus another one that would be a reason to spend more money on it or if it has like cool lighting effects on it for example that might be another reason to spend more money but beyond that the way that I personally shop for money for hump for money yeah I shop for money the way I personally shop for RAM is I look for a brand that I trust so it should come with a lifetime warranty if it's worth its salt it should be something that you know you can't find a whole lot of oh yeah the stall all failed on me or whatever else because most of the good brands out there have pretty good reputations these days there's been a lot of consolidation a lot of the bad run companies are just gone and and that's really what I look for and you know who has a special edition round that like Bret matches my other board really well stuff like that so there you go guys that is my take on memory yes there are situations where more memory bandwidth is needed and you can't possibly have enough most of these exist more like in servers not really in desktop environments leave a like on the video if you liked it leave a dislike if you disliked it and leave a comment if the results were not something you were expecting to see and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips