skylake i3 and i5

[distantthunder]

im planning on building a new PC and noticed that the skylake i3 6320 and the skylake i5 6600k both use memory types DDR4-1866/2133 .... yet the GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Gaming 5 EU DDR4 ATX Motherboard i plan on using will support up to 3000MHz. i would like to know why intel doesn't support these speeds?? i do know both cpu's can support 64Gb ddr4 ram max

i plan on using corsair ddr4 either 2400MHz or 2666MHz. would this speed be fine?? thanks for any help

StormChaser

 

[steelclaw]

Well, it is actually not officially supported by Intel and the main reason for that is because the 2133+ MHz DDR4 RAM is considered overclocking which is often associated with system instability. Intel doesn't want to risk with any official statements because that will hurt their marketing and the gains are going to be null.

In reality, the RAM will work at that advertised speed considering you have a decent motherboard but the performance benefits for most tasks are going to be null. My personal opinion is that it's a waste of money and I would never pay extra for that. Then again if you want to be the "Hurr hurr, my RAM is faster than your CPU" guy, go for it.

 

[BadActor]

Increased RAM speed does make a difference in some games and apps which are CPU bound. It also helps to reduce stutter in games even when the FPS aren't affected. I think it a bargain to spend another 10 or 15 dollars for faster RAM and pick up an extra 20 percent FPS in some games particularly if using an i3 or i5 which are more likely to be CPU bound. And considering that development of GPU's is outpacing that of CPU's in terms of performance, this is going to become more prevalent. Check out the benchmarks below which show the affects of faster RAM on an i3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G-7bfPG2dE