RAM Speed Impact on Benchmarks

[David (PassMark)]

If you are low on memory and the operating system needs to swap to disk, then having more memory is far far more important than having faster memory.

If you have enough RAM for all the applications you run and some spare for the disk cache, then having even more memory isn't very important and having faster memory might help. (but generally only help slightly).

[FastTurtle]

Thanks for the reply David:

So my thinking for the last 20 years that "MORE" memory was better then faster memory is right (at least in regards to Intel)

[David (PassMark)]

The real world impact would depend on what type of applications you are running on the machines. For example if the machine was a web or file server then the performance might be limited by the disk and the speed of the RAM would have next to no impact.

[FastTurtle]

I've got an E3-1230v3 Xeon (Haswell) and want to know what kind of hit my system RAM is making - PC1333 (10600).

In reviewing the benchmark results, I'm getting just over 9100 - looking as though ram speed is impacting the benchmark somewhat.

Just checked and performance is reasonable against others as I'm within 500 pts of the avg listed for a stock setup.