My rig for reference.
3570k i5
z77 extreme
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
Cooler Master HAF RC-912-KKN1 case
asus 660 ti cu II
SeaSonic X Series X-850
What I'm wondering is what speed should I shoot for when it comes to ram, and I'm not asking this as a lamer here. Sure I could easily spend $300 on a nice g.skil DDR3 Trident X 2600mhz kit and pretend I'm the man. I'm more so interested in the "what dolphin will use" area. For example we all know 4 cores is all you need, any more is a waste as far as cpu's go. I found a nicely over clocked sandy/ivy at 5.0 does a nice job of things. What I dont know is what speed of ram to aim for. I know the intel chips like fast ram but I'm sure there is an over kill level here some where?
I'd like to stay at 1.5v with a 9-9-9-27 or so, thinking 1866, but will 2100 at 1.55 volt be worth it? If I need to go much faster i'd have to do 1.65 and drop a heat sink on the ram and I dont know if its worth all the money and OC risk.
Can anyone share some thoughts?
Like nearly every application memory frequency has almost no measurable effect on dolphins performance at all.
DDR3 1333MHz will give you the same performance as DDR3 2666 MHz.
RAM speed does not refer only to the amount of MHz and the voltage. It also refers what kind of memory module you are expecting to buy.
As far as I know, RDRAM modules are one of the fastest types of RAM, but the bad thing is that are a bit old.
JMC47 actually *did* get a decent Dolphin performance benefit from overclocking his RAM. I don't know shit about RAM overclocking, though, so I can help no further.
It depends on the cpu and if you're using an IGP or not. It benefits the older nehalem cpus more.
oliverfrancisco Wrote:RAM speed does not refer only to the amount of MHz and the voltage. It also refers what kind of memory module you are expecting to buy.
The type of memory module affects speed but it not part of ram speed. Ram speed is implied to mean either frequency, latency, or bandwidth usually depending on context. With frequency being the generally assumed definition. Sometimes the term can be used to refer to specific benchmarking results in the context of a benchmark.
oliverfrancisco Wrote:As far as I know, RDRAM modules are one of the fastest types of RAM, but the bad thing is that are a bit old.
I'm not even going to get into a discussion on this. Rdram is slow as hell compared to modern memory in every way.
ok , then perhaps I made another error, but I had 1600 7-7-7-24 running in my system playing NSBM. Very playable, then my ram gave up the ghost ( my fault ) and I put int 1333 10-10-10-28 or so...( bak up ram). Game hardly runs. Now I'm not arguing with anyone here but to me that is a difference. My specs are above in the first post, if you need more info please ask. Just trying to make the right decision. Though, if you all agree 1600 is just as good as 2400 or 133 as good as 1600 in terms of dolphin I will accept that as an answer of course.
What does "gave up the ghost" mean?
There is no way in hell that going from 1600 MHz to 1333 MHz ram would have a significant impact on performance for you unless you were using an IGP. Are you sure the 1333 MHz ram is configured in dual channel mode? If it is then something else changed with your system.
I have tried DDR3 1333MHz, 1600MHz, and 1866MHz ram in my system. The difference in performance between the three with discrete graphics is less than 5%. A number of other forum users have reported similar findings. This also matches benchmarks conducted of similar applications not to mention it makes sense.
I suppose that could be possible if you were using EFB RAM since the game loves to use it XD
Edit: I need to not leave tabs open so long >.>
Nope both dual, fair enough guys. What technologies are beneficial? ( EFB, RDRAM ) Anything else?
@ExtremeDude2
Possible. However the difference should not be significant. Especially considering that the transfers are limited by pci-e link speed, not memory bandwidth.
@ulao
What do you mean? Memory hardware technologies?
EFB is a framebuffer that dolphin emulates. It has nothing to do with your systems physical memory. Rdram is a type of memory interface that existed from 1995-2003 and failed horribly in the market (it never caught on). Again it has nothing to do with modern physical memory.
The only differences between different consumer desktop DDR3 memory modules are voltage, latency, frequency, heatsinks, IC density (storage capacity), and cost. They all use the exact same underlying technology.