# Latency vs speed in gaming performance



## ULTRAGAMER (Jun 18, 2009)

I HAVE AMD 64 VENICE 3000+ @ TO 3800 SPEEDS (2.4), 1 GIGA CORSAIR XMS DDR 400 WITH 2-2-2-5 TIMINGS, THE QUESTION IS? IS BETTER TO HAVE THE MEMORY IN LOW LATENCY (STOCK) OR OVERCLOCK IT TO (533mhz) 2.5-4-4-7,( IT WORKS IN THIS SPEED, FULLY TESTED), WHICH IS BETTER FOR GAMING PERFORMANCE


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## Phædrus241 (Mar 28, 2009)

YOU COULD TRY HITTING CAPSLOCK. THAT MIGHT HELP.

Memory speed really does very little for performance. Having faster memory or lower latency memory will have barely any noticeable effect in games. The lower latency takes up less power, so go with that.

But here's an analogy. Your CPU is like a car wash, and your RAM is like a parking lot. The faster your car wash is, the better since you get more cars washed, but having a faster (more easily navigable?) parking lot only has a little bit of effect. You just want a parking lot that can hold as many cars as you'll need and that can deliver cars as fast as the car wash can take them. You get what I'm saying? You just need RAM that's big _enough and fast enough to feed your CPU, which you have. So there's no need to overclock._


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

What he said ^

or you could use the man in the box anaolgy. you have one man in a box being passed an instruction which is fine but that man has to process the instruction then carry it out but if you have two men in the box then one can process it whilst the other carries it out.

The instruction comes from ram the processing and carruing out is your cpu. Hence overclocking the cpu can be a good thing if done properly but overclocking the ram has little effect as the ram can only pass an instruction at a time so if your ram is big neough to hold instructions then you don't really need to mess with it. Only changing the frequency within its limits may be required when overclocking but not going over that frequency.


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## linderman (May 20, 2005)

watch your resource meter when doing something intensive ............ which one get completely 100% used most often and for the longest duration ......... thats the component that needs help


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