CL9 vs CL10

[parasight]

Hi. I can get either 8GB CL9 or 16GB CL10 for the same price, they're both corsair vengeance Low profile series, 1600MHZ.
I wanted to ask if there's any difference between cl 10 and cl 9? my main usages will be Gaming, Fraps (recording), Sony vegas (rendering..)
If it matters, my CPU (3570k) will be overclocked to 4.5GHZ.
Thanks!

 

[blazorthon]

Technically, CL9 is going to be ever so slightly faster than CL10 if the kits are identical in all other specifications, but it's really a pretty much insignificant difference in real life.

The number after CL is CAS latency as measured in cycles. There are an equal number of cycles per second to half of the rated data rate for DDR3 memory (IE 800 million for DDR3-1600), giving the CAS latency with a CL of 9 to be about 10% lower than CL10. If you really wanted to, we could do the math to see the difference between them in nanoseconds.

 

[tokencode]

You'll hardly notice the better CAS latency in the real world, while the extra 8GB of RAM might come in handy for video editing. I think the extra 8GB of RAM is the better value.

 

[parasight]

I could try and lower the timings on the CL10 sticks, will it work?

 

[blazorthon]

Possibly, but it really isn't a big deal. Also, I seem to have misread earlier (I thought they were both 8GB). If the second kit is 16GB, then I'd suggest going for the 16GB kit. It won't make a difference in gaming, but maybe it'll help some of your other stuff.

 

[parasight]

Best answer selected by parasight.