RAM question!

[Lethul]

I read on another forum where they wanted advice on their setup.
And one of the answers was like this:

"1. The RAM's timing is somewhat slow. get 5-5-5-15 for the same price or 4-4-4-12 for +$50. It will give you 5-10% bump in preformance so its a good deal. "

What does that mean? What is 5-5-5-15 4-4-4-12 etc? Im totally clueless in the RAM department and wanna learn

 

[TdC]

the numbers basically mean the amount of clock cycles the ram needs to achieve a certain state. Each number corresponds to a certain event, like "how long it takes for a certain address to be selected" etc. More or less lower numbers mean better performance and usually more expense, however different kinds of ram work at different numbers for different reasons.

 

[Reza]

A quick and basic reply is that it's a measure of the Latency (sort of the equivalent to the ping on your net connection or acces time on your hard drive).

So you have amongst other stuff, three factors you can have a look at when you choose Ram. Capacity, Bandwidth, and Latency.

So for example I have 2*2GB DDR2 rated PC6400 (the bandwidth) CL4 (the latency 4,4,4,12). If I want to increase my bandwidth to PC8000 then i need to loosen my timings to CL5 amongst other things.

Depending on the application your PC is running it might be more latency or more bandwidth dependant, so what is best for you will depend what you need your PC to do.

Lots of the bencmarking guys like very low latency Ram for some of the benchmarks they like to try and break records on etc.