RAM spd vs. CPU spd

[molsen]

Does increasing RAM speed help performance more than increasing CPU speed? In some tasks, I think so. In others, no.

I found that my computer "feels" faster and snappier if i'm running at 2.53GHz on the CPU and 230MHz on the RAM vs. a faster CPU rate and a slower RAM rate.

benchmarks always tell the same story, more CPU speed helps some things and more RAM speed helps other things.

I'm not asking one specific question, but instead trying to open a discussion on specific computing tasks and whether they are helped more by CPU or RAM.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the subject? I ask partially because I've hit a limit with both CPU and RAM and I think it may be cost worthy to buy a gig of DDR550 or DDR600.

I feel that programs close and switch between other programs faster when I increase RAM speed. But there is no perceived difference in load times whether I increase CPU or RAM speed.

 

[Trifid]

You will notice faster switching between programs if you had more RAM. My whole PC feels sluggish when I had 1GB in there, but adding just 512 more, minimizing and maximising apps was alot quicker and smoother.

 

[molsen]

well i'm sure adding more physical memory would help alot of things. but i'm curious what peoples' experiences have been with raising RAM speeds

 

[dario03]

It would depend on what you were doing and how much you were changing the speeds.
Example from my computer is that I can run my AMD64 @ 2.53ghz but I have to run 3/5 ram divider so my ram will only run at 160mhz. So I lowered the cpu to 2.35ghz but raised the ram to 218mhz. So now in 3dmark my score went down a little but everything loads way quicker (3dmark isn't really made for cpu testing but the most cpu intensive thing I do is video games). All in all I like having the added ram speed. But if you run slower mhz on the ram you could probably tighten the timings better. So it really depends on a lot of things.

 

[gurusan]

2gb does wonders

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

More RAM speed will help to a point. You can easily tell that when using DDR2 400 compared to DDR2 800 that there is hardly any increase in performance, but you also need to figure out the loosened timings in that.

 

[molsen]

what about if i kept my cpu at around 2.5GHz but when from DDR 460 to DDR 600? (230MHZ to 300MHz) I reckon it would be a big improvement in performance considering the difference between 200 and 230mhz is easily noticed

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Yea it would be a big difference. As long as you can keep tighter timings than what DDR2 can do. But I am basing this all on DDR2 400 and 800 since I use AM2 now...