Memory modules buyers guide

Overclocking the memory

What effect does overclocking memory have and is it useful to change the latencies in the bios manually? To establish the gains we took a Intel Pentium XE 955 and an AMD Athlon FX62 and benchmarked memory in a combination of speeds (DDR2 533, 667 and 800) and timings (3-3-3-9, 4-4-4-12 and 5-5-5-15). It is not a surprise that in all benchmarks lower timings and higher clock speeds have a positive effect on performance, where higher clock speeds show a bigger increase in performance then lowering the latencies.

The AMD processor benefits more from changes in the memory then the Intel processor, mainly due to the integrated memory controller of the AMD. In Sisoft Sandra for instance the overall performance gain with the Intel processor between DDR2-533 5-5-5-15 and DDR2-800 3-3-3-9 is 11.5%, whereas with the AMD the difference in this specific benchmark is 71%. In real life performance, as we tested in the quake 4 benchmark, DDR2-800 caused an increase of 30 frames per second over DDR2 533. With a socket AM2 system it clearly pays to purchase fast low latency memory and overclock this if possible.

Intel Pentium XE 955 benchmarks

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 benchmarks