What is benefit of 1600mhz ram?

Hey guys,

New alienware owner to be (purchased M14x--basically my dream laptop)

I'm just curious, how the 1600mhz ram will benefit speed...esp in games. Or does it have no benefit?

Also, I look forward to someone eventually posting a thread on how to overclock and squeeze every drop of power from the M14x (please make it noob-friendly )

 

It won't benefit you at all.

Even if you get a 2720QM or up - that'll even clock the RAM at the correct 1600MHz - the difference between RAM is, maybe, a 1-3% FPS increase in games, and that's going from bargain bin crap to ultra high performance. The difference of two bargain bin RAM types won't do anything for you.

 

The only time when 1600mhz will outperform 1333 (or even 1066 for that matter) is overclocking.

Bah, there was a great link, to Anandtech I believe, that shows how high speed RAM is just a waste of money. Even for extreme, extreme overclocks 1333 and 1600 were sufficient. I tried searching for about 5 minutes, but I couldn't find it.

In real world gaming tests, the faster RAM pretty much did nothing. In some tests, it did better by a few frames (like 62 vs 60) and in others it actually did worse (like 49 vs 50). So, even when it did better in benchmarks, it really wasn't anything significant; it was probably just random variation between th tests.

 

WHat about other than gaming? Like the computers general speed and responsiveness? Or are we in overkill territory already.

 

Definitely in overkill territory. You'll see a difference in synthetic benchmarks, and maybe in special cases like doing a very long cpu-intensive render, but apart from that, for the very vast majority of applications you won't notice a difference - there are bigger bottelnecks in the system to worry about.

 

The increase in speeds improves bandwidth, but bandwidth is rarely the bottleneck with system ram. You would likely only notice an improvement if you were handling very large files. Latency is mostly what is important.

It's similar to a hard-drive's bottleneck; The issue of how fast an hd or ram can get data from point A to point B isn't nearly as important as how quickly it can access or write the data it is handling.

It's different with a GPU as a GPU has to manipulate a framebuffer many times per second, which is usually hundreds of megabytes in size.

 

They've also proven time and time again that "generic RAM" and "gamer RAM" has next to no significant difference. A shiny heatsink, sure, but otherwise there's no real difference. The only time the expensive, l33t gamer RAM helped was for people trying to OC, as you pointed out, too.

And for the cost... people could have gotten a better CPU or GPU, and it would have benefit them far, far more.

 

The only real reason I get "gamer" RAM over the generic, value-orientated stuff is from a reliability standpoint. RAM is usually the cause of instibility in OCing, assuming proper thermals of course. I pay for the heatspreader and the few degrees cooler the RAM runs. That's about it.