Difference between regular desktop memory and gaming memory

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Toastrman

Toastrman

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Jun 2, 2013
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I'm looking to buy 4 more gigs of ram for my tower. It's mainly used for gaming and I'm wondering what the difference between the two different kinds of RAM are. Curious because gaming is a lot more expensive than regular
 
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Tradesman1
Mainly marketing, many of the sets offered as gaming, are actually plain jane entry level sticks and often too, they will take models that don't move and rebrand them as 'Gaming', particularly sticks from Kingston and Corsair that are basically entry level 1600/9 sets and call for a voltage of 1.65, these are often old using weak memory ICs, hence they need 1.65 volts to run stable, where as about 88% of the 1600 sticks out there run fine at 1.5 and many with a lower CL. If looking for actuual performance DRAM look for set that are 1600/7-8 1866/8 2133/9 2400/10 or 2666/11, those are higher performance than the 'norm' at each given freq
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Deleted member 217926

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^ This.

There is no difference. RAM is RAM is RAM. Some RAM is faster or has tighter timings but it's still just RAM. With the last few generations of CPUs from both Intel and AMD the memory controller is on the CPU and there is very little benefit from high speed memory except in certain specific applications. Gaming is not one of them. DDR3 1600 has been the sweet spot. There is about a 1% difference if that between DDR3 1600 and DDR3 2133 in gaming.

The newest Intel Haswell CPUs like higher speed memory and AMD APUs benefit from very high speed memory on the graphics end. Probably what you are seeing marketed as 'gaming memory' is higher speed stuff that is basically useless as what it's marketed as.
 
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Tradesman1

Tradesman1

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Jun 5, 2013
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Mainly marketing, many of the sets offered as gaming, are actually plain jane entry level sticks and often too, they will take models that don't move and rebrand them as 'Gaming', particularly sticks from Kingston and Corsair that are basically entry level 1600/9 sets and call for a voltage of 1.65, these are often old using weak memory ICs, hence they need 1.65 volts to run stable, where as about 88% of the 1600 sticks out there run fine at 1.5 and many with a lower CL. If looking for actuual performance DRAM look for set that are 1600/7-8 1866/8 2133/9 2400/10 or 2666/11, those are higher performance than the 'norm' at each given freq
 
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Christopher MacQueen

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Oct 6, 2013
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So you guys are saying 1600 is a sweet spot. 10 CAS or 9 CAS? I been debating what new ram to get. Now I understand 9 CAS is better. But is it enough to warrant higher price for gaming?

Also is it worth upgrading from 1333mhz to 1600mhz?
 
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