TEntel

alt-tabbing out of games seems to depend on your gpu drivers.

DDR2 RAM with stock latency 6 is not common. cas 5 is where it's at.


And benches seem to show an improvement of negligible to about +10% performance on a Phenom II DDR2 vs DDR3.

__________________
WMP12>>320 KB/s mp3>>HT Omega Claro>>Audio Technica ATH-A700

nathris

Clock speed and timings are the exact same thing.

Clock speed is measured in MHz, which is a unit of time, timings are measured in ns delay, which is also a unit of time, so clock speed + timings = overall speed.

It makes a slight difference, but what you're really noticing is the difference between a Core i7 and a Core 2. The speed doesn't really have much of an impact compared to triple vs dual channel and a better cpu architecture.

TEntel

the "timings" are the number of clock cycles the system pauses for when accessing data.

they have a very different effect than the frequency that the ram operates at.

__________________
WMP12>>320 KB/s mp3>>HT Omega Claro>>Audio Technica ATH-A700

bomfunk

The latency is measured in clock cycles, so, hypothetically, 5MHz RAM with CAS of 3 will have a lower absolute latency than 3MHz of CAS3 RAM.

To get the absolute latency, divide the clockspeed by the latency, e.g.

Compare 800/5 and 1600/8; DDR3 wins both in terms of latency and bandwidth.

EDIT: A correction to the above; the above formula gives a rough indication, where a bigger number is better, but it won't give the absolute latency. I think you need to divide the latency by clockspeed to get the absolute latency in seconds.

I'll just check if my train of logic fell off a bridge...

__________________
Statistix show that 92% of teenagers have moved to real music . If you are one of the sane 8% that still listen to funk, hip-hop or jazz, copy and past this into your sig, for thou art now offically awesome!DISCLAIMER:
By reading the above post, you accept that the poster ("bomfunk") is now the rightful owner of all your present possessions.

TEntel

But changing latency vs frequency will affect different things (access time vs bandwidth) if I understand correctly.

that's all I'm getting at.

__________________
WMP12>>320 KB/s mp3>>HT Omega Claro>>Audio Technica ATH-A700

bomfunk

If the absolute latency remains the same (e.g. clockspeed and latencies are increased at same ratio), so should access time, at least in theory...

__________________
Statistix show that 92% of teenagers have moved to real music . If you are one of the sane 8% that still listen to funk, hip-hop or jazz, copy and past this into your sig, for thou art now offically awesome!DISCLAIMER:
By reading the above post, you accept that the poster ("bomfunk") is now the rightful owner of all your present possessions.

The_Rocker

Faster memory usually means that you might see faster loading times and switching times between applications. This is because by having faster RAM, you are effectively "increasing the speed limit of the road that connects the CPU and memory", thus allowing your CPU swap things in and out of the memory faster.

Like has already been said, you are noticing the different between the new CPU, new chipset and the fast that your DDR3 is much faster and you have 6GB of it.

Latency is relative to speed, hence why you don't have 1600Mhz DDR3 running at 4-4-4-12.

If you were to do a direct fair comparison on a DDR3 775 board between 4GB 800Mhz DDR2 and 4GB 1600Mhz DDR3, i beleive that the increase in speed will be minimal if any.

The slowest hardware concerning data in your PC is your HDD's. A good RAID set up pulls about 200-300MB/s read speed. Whereas your RAM is already ripping it up at around 10,000MB/s.

__________________
Planned Upgrades (Coming Soon):
Intel Core i7 950 D0 (Deal in progress)
6GB Kingston 2000Mhz HyperX (Deal in progress)
ASUS Rampage II Extreme X58 (Ordered)
Thermalright LGA1366 Bolt-Thru-Kit (Ordered)

Different GFX set up (Possibly 5870's)

jpz

I am not too familiar with the lastest games and vista/windows 7, but with older games and windows xp usually the longest part of alt-tabbing out of a game is switching video modes. Don't quote me on this, but I think it depends on your graphics card, drivers, and operating system. Your monitor can also play a significant role in the amount of time it takes if your computer makes a request to change display modes or drops the connection. I have found that alt-tabbing in and out of games works much better(under xp at least) when playing games in window mode instead of full-screen. As long as you have enough ram, you should be able to switch in and out of your game instantly.

__________________

tubers

thanks for telling me about the GPU thing!

10% for more than a 100% in price? oh well if thats the "PC" rule (wayyyy exaggerated law of diminshing return) then thats just too bad for me..

oh well better face it if that were to be the case thanks again

tubers

so why are all the RAMs so fast compared to the HDDs? thanks.. thats such a waste then.. or maybe its so cheap to make those RAMs that fast thats why they do it? LOL idk.. noob here