Memory Overclocking on Z390 Coffee Lake: What RAM Speed Do You Need?

Gaming

1280x720 Gaming Benchmarks

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, running DDR4-4400 C18 provided a performance increase of up to 47.90 percent in average frames per second over standard DDR4-2133. On the other hand, Strange Brigade showed a 6.57 percent improvement when using the faster memory on the DirectX 12 API and around 3.99 percent on the Vulkan API. For F1 2018, the performance improvement is around 37.85 percent when using DDR4-4400 over DDR4-2133.

Both Ubisoft titles benefited from faster memory. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, DDR4-4400 memory increased the average frame rate by 45.71 percent over DDR4-2133. In Far Cry 5, DDR4-4400 showed a 38.79 percent improvement.

1920x1080 Gaming Benchmarks

DDR4-4200 and DDR4-4400 pumped out 33.33 percent higher average frames per second in comparison to DDR4-2133 in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at a resolution of 1920x1080. Higher memory speeds made no difference in Strange Brigade on the DirectX 12 API, and the difference with the Vulkan API is negligible. DDR4-4200 puts out 19.88 percent higher average frames than DDR4-2133 in F1 2018.

DDR4-4200 performed the best in Assassin's Creed Odyssey delivering up to 33.33 percent over baseline DDR4-2133. As for Far Cry 5, DDR4-4000 was 31.90 percent better.

2560x1440 Gaming Benchmarks

Improvement in Shadow of the Tomb Raider was less than 4 percent, and the difference in Strange Brigade is below 1 percent. The fastest memory configuration from the slowest showed a 6.58 percent difference in F1 2018.

The DDR4-4200 and DDR4-4400 configurations performed 21.88 percent better in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. As for Far Cry 5, DDR4-4000 and DDR4-4400 both delivered 19.30 percent higher average frames per second.

3840x2160 Gaming Benchmarks

Faster memory makes very little difference in gaming at the 4K (3840x2160) resolution. Titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Strange Brigade, and F1 2018 revealed negligible benefits from running higher-speed memory kits. As a matter of fact, some of the faster memory kits actually performed worse than their slower counterparts.

A few configurations provided better performance in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. DDR4-3200, DDR4-3600, DDR4-4000, and DDR4-4200 increased the average frame rate up to 8 percent. In Far Cry 5, memory above DDR4-3200 performed around 2.63 percent better.

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Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.