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memory - Performance related to ram speed



My question is: why overclocking the RAMs does not bring a significant performance increasing? If I speed up their frequency and/or their latency, I will not get big advantages. I can't understand it, considering that the CPU should be able to read and write faster as well as processing data. Or maybe the bottleneck is getting smaller because of faster CPUs? Please give me as much information as you can.


Regards.



Answer



Because in most general-purpose cases, RAM speed is not the bottleneck for a system. What difference is a few nano seconds going to make when it takes more than six million nanoseconds to pull the data off of the harddrive in the first place?


This is one of the reasons I stopped doing manual overclocks on much of my hardware. It simply doesn't make enough of a difference where it matters. Hopping into the BIOS for a few seconds and telling my motherboard to boost the CPU frequency by 30%? Alright, that's noticeable. Spending hours and hours of repeated restarts and stress testing to push an extra 20-100Mhz out of the CPU, PCIe, and RAM? That's just not worth it for me. I'm never going to notice the difference, not when the only thing I really spend waiting on these days are for webpages and other files to download over the Internet, or loading files off of my harddisk.


Reading/writing to disk is one of the largest bottlenecks in most systems, and also one of the most easily fixed, and this is why SSDs are so nice. Loading a TF2 level? 30+ seconds on my platter disk. Overclocking my memory and loading a TF2 level? Still 30+ seconds on my platter disk. Move the TF2 install to my SSD? Less 5 seconds easy to load it.


Unless you're doing work or have applications that specifically transfer large amounts of data back and forth in memory, and that is going to be maxing out the memory bandwidth for days and days and days on end (like server farm animation rendering, commercial data processing facilities, academic and scientific data processing), then there's simply not enough of a difference in the output for boosting your RAM by overclocking to make a significant, noticeable impact.



Doubling the amount of RAM you have on the other hand...


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