Memory speed over rated?

[HotStuff]

I had long suspected this was the case with the issues I had with memory and my PC way back months ago.

On p115 of this months PC gamer it reads

Question: So I need fast RAM then?

Answer: "For games, no. Memory bottlenecking is not an issue for any current game engine, and you'd be far better off spending the extra money on a better CPU or graphics card. Huge memory bandwidths are essential for servers that are running 10 or 20 instances of windows....but games are a different kind of application ~ at best you'll see maybe four or five frames per second improvement for several hundred pounds of investment"

"opt for lower latencies....RAM remains the most fragile component in a system"

Just to remind you guys what happened to me I started with 1066Mhz DDR2 but couldn't get any stability. Dropped down to 800Mhz which worked until I upgraded BIOS. Finally dropped to 667Mhz and has been fine ever since.

The frame rate drop? With CS video stress test, it dropped from 270fps (with 1066) to 267fps (with 667). By my calculations thats a 1.1% drop in framerate. Hardly worth it for the reduction in stability.

 

[Haven]

Memory "speed" is both throughput and latency. Having memory that works at a high bus speed usually means that its timing settings are a little more lax (higher latency), its great memory for overclocking the FSB of your processor but that does not necessarily translate into high memory perfomance numbers.

Lower FSB but also tighter timings will often give more over all performance but is not so useful for overclocking your CPU using the bus speed. You will usually see good results on increased FPS in games from this type of memory though. The holy grail is memory capable of high bus speeds and tight timings, you pay through the nose for this though.

Memory bandwidth is largely an irrelevant issue these days as (to my knowledge) few systems are bandwidth limited, instead they are GPU/CPU capped for performance.

Good thread though.