Memory speed/timings and their effect on gaming. HELP please :)

[LifeOnMars]

Being a relative newbie to PC gaming I have had my fair share of woes and disappointments since building my first budget machine. Having now being able to successfully overclock my dated CPU, I'm looking to get questions answered and help on how to tweak my memory for better/smoother performance.

So, any resident experts who can shed some light on whether better timings,speed and what not provide a smoother gaming experience and how this will show up in games. Does it increase fps or just smooth the whole experience at the same framerates? I really am clueless. I have played around with my Kingston Value Ram Timings and speed based on different overclocks with my processor but not really sure what Im doing. Any help is indeed very much appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Kursah]

I would say that there would be a smaller impact than many realize, mostly higher speeds and tighter timings are more good for benching and e-peen imo. It won't hinder to run faster memory by any means, but really as long as you're running DDR-800 speeds or faster you have plenty of bandwidth to get the job done for gaming.

Plus, to add to that, I'd rather have 4GB of DDR800 than 2GB of DDR1066+. More memory will be beneficial to EVERYTHING as-far-as OS, programs, and gaming, more-so than faster memory in my experience.

If you can run DDR800 at 5-5-5-15 or 4-4-4-12 you're good to go with plenty of bandwidth for your gaming needs. CPU and GPU power seems to have more impact on games, and depending on game resolutions played, GPU is the most important factor...at lower resolutions it helps to have a little more speed on the CPU/System Bus and in-turn your memory speed will increase which probably won't add 1-2FPS, maybe 2 at most imo.

 

[PaulieG]

I've found that memory timings seem to make more of a difference with frame rates then speed does. I've got nothing right now to back it up, but it's been my experience. Nothing dramatic though. I've found really tight timing will give me 2-3 fps more on average. I'd say don't bother, unless you are a benching junkie like me. In gaming, memory stability is probably worth more than a couple of fps.

 

[Darknova]

I agree with Kursah, unless you are benching anything over 800-1000 isn't necessary. Although I have found that higher speeds can decrease loading times, even if it's only by a few seconds.

More RAM also helps load times too

 

[P4-630]

DDR800 works fine for gaming, with tighter timings windows itself and applications load a bit faster, quick response

 

[LifeOnMars]

ok so it seems my kingston ram is capable of 4-5-5-12 so have changed it and it has smoothed any jerkiness out of my games...I'm loving it Thanks for your help guys.

 

[hat]

With an AMD Athlon 5200+, 8500gt and DDR2 533 RAM running at 4-4-4-12, I found that overclocking the memory to a higher speed smoothed the game out. but that was 533. I tighten timings now, but mostly to make the system feel more fluid/responsive and to get stuff to load faster (ala BF2 maps). My generic dell ram that runs DDR2 800 6-6-6-28 1.8v out of the box runs DDR2 817 4-5-5-4 1.9v now. Much better than before.