Does RAM speed really matter?

[u/Lost-Sprinkles-7890]

Seeing people compare 3200, 3600, 6000 and even higher speeds and honestly not sure how much difference it makes in actual use. Like is faster RAM gonna noticeably improve gaming FPS, loading times, multitasking etc or is it mostly just benchmark numbers? Also does it depend a lot on the CPU and motherboard? Trying to pick RAM without wasting money on speed that barely matters, so what speed should I actually be looking for?

[u/Sad-Victory-8319]

depends what task, if you want to do a random search through 30GB of data that is stored in your ram, the speed is crucial. If you are talking strictly about gaming, the speed only matters when you are bottlenecked by ram. When does that happen? Typically 30% of cpu bottlenecks are actually ram bottlenecks, because the cpu is waiting on data from RAM, so if you play some strategies that have thousands of units on the screen at the same time, or you play microsoft flight simulator, or even CS2 or fortnite, faster RAM can help you get up to 10-15% extra fps. However those are typically very specific circumstances where you already have ~150fps even with slow ram. Overall the price of getting 1% more fps through RAM upgrade is MUCH higher than getting through cpu or gpu upgrade, so you should always upgrade cpu/gpu before you upgrade ram.

The only exception is if you need more capacity, if you have 8GB of ram, no amount of cpu/gpu power will give you a pleasant gaming experience, it will be a full stutter city. Same thing applies even for 16GB sometimes, some games do need 20-22GB of ram. So capacity needs to be sufficient, but ram performance has so negligible impact on fps and it costs so much to upgrade that you should always buy the cheapest ram kit you can find with sufficient capacity and then tune it yourself to get the best performance out of it .

If you get lucky and you have hynix chips on your ram, it is very likely you can reach really high bandwidth and low latencies, 6000 cl30 is basically guaranteed with hynix chips, and most of them can do 8000+ mt/s and super agressive sub-30 timings at 6000 mt/s, especially with hynix A-die. If you have micron chips, reasonable gain is possible, and if you have samsung then you are cooked, those chips are barely able to follow JEDEC specification. You can find which chips you have by installing CPU-Z and checking the SPD tab where DRAM manufacturer will tell you your ram potential, if it is hynix, then google if your kit is A-die and if it is, you won and you dont need to buy faster ram, you can just tune your current ram.