[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]not to be negative, but is there a point to overclocking ram?i mean on an outside of rendering applications that are ram heavy, is there even a need for faster memory?keep in mind, i can see a need for faster cpu, faster gpu, faster hdd, faster ssd (not any more, not its price over speed they should focus on) but memory?[/citation]
The bottlenecks of performance in order are CPU -> RAM -> Disk. If your bottleneck is not your CPU for some 100% utilization computation, but instead CPU resources go unused because reading too / from memory is taking too long. RAM Frequency increases the rate the memory can be read, and how fast it can be read sequentially. So if you want to read out 500MB of ram to cpu and subtract 1 from every number in that chunk of RAM, if it isnt CPU bottlenecked, the ram speed is too low to load all that data fast enough. The CAS latency is how fast a random area of memory can be reached and read from, frequency is how fast data can be read from the entirety of the stick.
So more frequency means more bandwidth, lower CAS means faster random access. More frequency becomes more important as CPUs get faster because they can execute stuff faster, read and process instructions faster, etc.
So more bandwidth is important, but so is access time, which is why maximizing frequency while minimizing latency is important and a hard tradeoff.