Thread: Faster memory vs cost ?

Which of the following memory is probably faster??
Mushkin redline CAS 6 (don’t see this often anymore) at 1600?

Or

OCZ reaper at Cas 9 1866 (what an odd number)


One more question is If i oc the mushkin would the cas remain at 6?

The reason you don't see CAS 6 much anymore is because latency isn't dependent purely on the CAS value. It's a combination of clockspeed and CAS. DDR3-1600 CAS 6 will have the same latency as DDR2-800 CAS 3 (which is unheard of) or DDR400 CAS 1.5 (also unheard of). Between the two, I'd take the Mushkin, but not because of the speed. I'd take it because it's 6GB, while the OCZ kit is 3.

Oh, and if you overclock it, you'll almost definitely need to loosen the timings. I'd be quite surprised if you could hit any decent overclock at CAS 6.

There are a few RAM tests out there that indicate that CAS latency has a much larger effect (relatively) on performance than RAM frequency, at least for multicore processors. Higher frequencies gave better benchmark testing, but with real world apps and situations, it was lower latencies that gave better performance over jumps in frequency. Depending on the degree of overclocking, the Mushkin timings of 6-6-6-18 at 1333 even upped a bit may well still outperform most RAM with higher latencies at 1600.

Since benchmarking performance numbers are from synthetic test suite apps and don't translate well to actual performance with real world apps, I'd go for lower latency over an increase in frequency. Even RAM with higher latencies usually need to have the timing adjusted with more extreme overclocks, so you usually still wind up ahead by going with lower latency memory.