Is Low Latency Worth The Money?

[kavau]

With CS2 RAM being quite a bit more expensive than CS2.5 or CS3, I am wondering how much performance increase the lower latency will really give? Is it worth the extra money? Can anyone give me a rough estimate as how much the system speed will change percentage-wise?

FYI, I am planning to build a system based on a 800 MHz FSB board (Abit SI7 or MSI Neo2) and a P4C 2.4 GHz.

Right now, my choice would be to go with 2x256MB Kingston PC3200 HyperX with CL2. Would you consider that a good choice?

TIA

Kavau

 

[Guest]

Cl2 does have a good impact on your overall computer performance. I would say something like 5-10% depending on the ram and the memory usage. Kingston is a good choice but reamains pretty expensive. But you know that you wont have any problem with kingston products...

 

[bum_jcrules]

It is not worth the cost. Most memory improvements come through faster frequency speeds.

You will get a lot more throughput perfomance gains from a 1 MHz increase in speed than from saving multiple clocks form lower latencies.



Live near Toronto and like to game but you can't make it to Quakecon?
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[bum_jcrules]

I have never seen that much of an impact on performance with DDRSDRAM.



Live near Toronto and like to game but you can't make it to Quakecon?
<A HREF="http://www.lanmash.com" target="_new"><b>LANMash2 is the same weekend 200+ gamers!</b></A>

 

[Guest]

I actually based my 5-10% on this article
<A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030519/i875p-07.html" target="_new">http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030519/i875p-07.html</A>
Now you can clearly see that kingston/corsair outperform the rest of the crowd and im pretty sure they all run at 400mhz even if the kingston is 433mhz...
So in that particular benchmark the 2-2-2-5 vs 2-3-3-6 timming added 20fps roughly 5%.
Also in How to Speed up Your RAM article they said something like that.

 

[bum_jcrules]

You are talking about 4 clocks of latency verses 1 or 0.5 clocks per read. That is a different story... But still you might see 5% increase. Might. In some apps you might not see anything. So overall the actual gain is less than 5%.

However if you ramped up the bus speeds by 1MHz you might see the same results with the same slower cycle timings.

The difference is 4 clocks per read cycle times "X" number of reads per second, verses 1 million more cycles per second. You can not gain as many cycles from lower latency settings.

CAS Latency used to mean a lot more in the days of FPM, EDO, BEDO, and SDRAM. Once we went to DDR the latency penalties became less important. The higher the clock speeds get the less important they will be.



Live near Toronto and like to game but you can't make it to Quakecon?
<A HREF="http://www.lanmash.com" target="_new"><b>LANMash2 is the same weekend 200+ gamers!</b></A>

 

[JP5]

For the extra $75 you could buy a much faster cpu -- if you are going for a 2.4C then you probably want cheaper RAM.