I very deliberately chose a mixture of synthetic and real world benchmarks.

240GB & 480GB Neutron GTX SSDs (for Adobe testing).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Overclocked (980MHz nominal, boost to 1150MHz, 7GHz GDDR5).

4x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3-2400.

Overclocked (4.5GHz, 45x100 BClk, 4GHz Northbridge.

Stock Speed (3.5GHz nominal, turbo to 3.7GHz on four cores or 3.9GHz on one core).

A 32GB (4x8GB) kit of our Dominator Platinum DDR3-2400 was used to scale from DDR3-1600 CAS 9 to DDR3-2400 CAS 10.

In testing, I discovered fairly conclusively that DDR3-1600 essentially leaves performance on the table even at stock clocks.įor testing I ran Intel’s Core i7-4770K at stock speeds and overclocked to 4.5GHz. I originally went into this testing specifically trying to determine whether or not overclocking would increase the strain enough on Haswell’s memory controller to justify higher speed memory. Between our work and AnandTech’s extremely thorough research, you’d think there would finally be a pervasive understanding of the benefit of faster memory on Haswell, but that hasn’t been the case. AnandTech already exhaustively detailed performance scaling with different memory speeds on Haswell, and I’ve studied the effect of memory speed on Battlefield 4’s performance. That Kaveri benefits from faster memory (at least on the GPU side) is a foregone conclusion that was confirmed by our testing. DDR3-1600 is quite simply no longer enough for modern chips outside of Ivy Bridge-E and Vishera.

So the idea that the paradigm might have shifted is tough to swallow because it goes against wisdom that’s been ingrained for years, a veritable lifetime in our industry.Įxcept that it has. There’s an element of truth to that AMD’s Bulldozer architecture and its derivatives see arguably minimal benefit from faster memory, and Ivy Bridge and its predecessors actually were just fine at DDR3-1600. The prevailing wisdom in the enthusiast community has been, for generations, that DDR3-1600 is the sweet spot and that faster memory offers at best extremely limited performance improvement and that at worst, it’s snake oil.

Benefits of overclocking ram