Upgrading My Ram

[FlyIgnite]

I am planning to upgrade my ram from 8gb to 16gb ddr3. Does the company of the ram matter when trying to decide what type of RAM to get? For example I have ram sticks from a certain company installed right now, will i have to buy RAM from that exact company or can i branch out to a different company? I dont want to buy RAM that will end up crashing my system.

Edited May 5, 2018 by FlyIgnite

[HeyYou]

Common practice is to have all your ram the same speed, from the same manufacturer. Is it 'required'? Nope. Doesn't even have to be the same speed, the mainboard will simply run the ram at the speed of the SLOWEST stick.

[JimmyRJump]

What HeyYou said. Most RAM manufacturers have kits with dimms that come from the same batch. I myself am using such a 4x4GB DDR3 Kingston HyperX Genesis kit. Runs @1600MHz, overclockable to 1916MHz (highest stable clock) Kingston is now manufacturing dimms under the HyperX brand name, without the Kingston added to it, by the way.

 

But you can buy separate dimms and use them no problem.

[Deleted52227506User]

I have not looked at benchmarks, stress tests or what really matters regarding RAM in the past 15 years. It seems the speeds as far as megahertz have increased tremendously, but when I look at CAS timings.... they seem to be the same or even slower for many RAM providers. Has hardware changed that drastically that CAS timings don't really act like a directly proportional equality to mhz as now the CPU's cache's are so much larger along with now GPUS are freaking monsters. I'd imagine northbridges and southbridges now have large and fast caches as well? Is the answer more complex than that and everything is more integrated so its not as much of an issue? Just wondering if someone had an easy answer?

[JimmyRJump]

I have not looked at benchmarks, stress tests or what really matters regarding RAM in the past 15 years. It seems the speeds as far as megahertz have increased tremendously, but when I look at CAS timings.... they seem to be the same or even slower for many RAM providers. Has hardware changed that drastically that CAS timings don't really act like a directly proportional equality to mhz as now the CPU's cache's are so much larger along with now GPUS are freaking monsters. I'd imagine northbridges and southbridges now have large and fast caches as well? Is the answer more complex than that and everything is more integrated so its not as much of an issue? Just wondering if someone had an easy answer?

I guess that, while frequencies went up, manufacturers have never found a way to get latency lower for those frequencies. Because, it's not just a matter of getting latency as low as possible; it's a matter of getting it as low as possible for the frequency in use.

[Erik005]

 

I have not looked at benchmarks, stress tests or what really matters regarding RAM in the past 15 years. It seems the speeds as far as megahertz have increased tremendously, but when I look at CAS timings.... they seem to be the same or even slower for many RAM providers. Has hardware changed that drastically that CAS timings don't really act like a directly proportional equality to mhz as now the CPU's cache's are so much larger along with now GPUS are freaking monsters. I'd imagine northbridges and southbridges now have large and fast caches as well? Is the answer more complex than that and everything is more integrated so its not as much of an issue? Just wondering if someone had an easy answer?

I guess that, while frequencies went up, manufacturers have never found a way to get latency lower for those frequencies. Because, it's not just a matter of getting latency as low as possible; it's a matter of getting it as low as possible for the frequency in use.

 

I found this article as I was also wandering why latency goes up with RAM speeds.

 

https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/ii/posts/arm-techcon-paper-why-dram-latency-is-getting-worse

 

If I dig trough my RAM pile I see some DDR-400 with a tight 3-3-3 timing

Edited May 15, 2018 by Erik005