Latency Settings and their Impact on Memory Performance

[Steve]

Yesterday evening, an e-mail from Corsair landed in my inbox containing a link to a very interesting set of benchmarks. Frequently, people ask what different latencies, timings and frequencies make to the performance of memory, but often the answer is somewhat hazy. There are so many factors involved. That didn't stop Corsair though, who have produced a paper which I'm sure you'll find useful.

Memory modules are currently available which support a wide variety of different speeds and latency settings. Speed is easy to understand - in general, faster is better. But what do the latency settings mean? And, what impact do they have on memory performance? This paper will provide a brief background on latency settings and what they mean. Then, we will move to the lab, where we will run a suite of benchmarks over a wide variety of latency settings, and we will measure the impact of these settings on benchmark scores.

If you wonder what the hell all the RAM terms used today mean, then Corsair have been kind enough to explain them too. Read the paper in PDF format.

[Blunty]

i wonder will it be safe to tighten my latencies to 2-2-2-5-1T (like they did in the documentation), from 3-3-3-8-12T and keep the fsb at 200MHz?

[Lee H]

You should be able to lower the timings from the ones you have now but the only Corsair ram I know of thats capable of the timings 2-2-2-5-1 is the older BH5 based modules and the newer TwinX-XL and PRO modules.

[Blunty]

You should be able to lower the timings from the ones you have now but the only Corsair ram I know of thats capable of the timings 2-2-2-5-1 is the older BH5 based modules and the newer TwinX-XL and PRO modules.

i am using corsair ram now, XMS3200C2PT TwinX (2x512MB), rev 5.1

[Lee H]

i am using corsair ram now, XMS3200C2PT TwinX (2x512MB), rev 5.1

Ahh right I got confused as your signature says xms3200.

The C2PT should be fine for running at tighter timings

[Kumagoro]

I dont have an AMD 64 so dont know much about the set up and what i do know comes
from reading hexus. I thought running 1T or 2T was not really much of an issue, i dont mean performace wise but ram running at 1 or 2 T. who has ram which cant run 1T?