RAM Latency Questions

[JacoFett]

First post here! So I am wondering what something like "13-15-15-28" means and if you should look at it when buying RAM? Is it important? I want to become really good at computers so high amounts of detail is appreciated.

 

[dylanestrada]

Lower latency=better

Higher speed=better

You want to find RAM with low CAS latency and a high speed (1866 mhz with CAS latency 9 is a great choice)

 

[Kewlx25]

Latency is how long it takes to find a location in memory, the speed(mhz) is how quickly the data can be transferred. Memory have small buffers and reads data in large chunks.

High bandwidth memory is great when you're sequentially accessing memory, low latency memory is great when you're doing random memory access. Most computers have a mix of both random and sequential. Modern CPUs are pretty good at hiding latency with advanced memory pre-fetching and many threads. There are some cases where one or the other is more important.

I generally don't care much about overclocking anymore because gone are the days of doubling your clock rate doubling your performance. Now going from 3ghz to 4.5ghz increases your performance by 15% in most cases and your electricity use triples.

 

[Tradesman1]

The first number (CL) is most important, the lower the better in a give data rate, i.e. if looking at 10 sets of 2666 and 2 of them have a CL of 13 and the others are 15, then grab one of the 13 sets