Resolved RAM CAS Latency

Hi

i have been reading about RAM CAS Latency and I found out that the "lower the CAS Latency the better "

My question is I have a 2 GB DDR2 ram and its Latency is CL5. I have been looking at the newer DDR3 ram and the latency comes as 9-9-9-24 for example.

Does this mean that the DDR2 ram have a better cas latency or am I missing something?

Thanks

 

thank you very much for your explanation, it makes more sense now

 

To your timing question, because DDR3 is significantly different electrically than DDR2 (uses less voltage, 30% more efficient, twice as fast), you really should not compare memory timings between DDR3 and DDR2 directly.

But, just to make sure there's no confusion, understand that you can NOT replace DDR2 with DDR3. They are NOT compatible electrically, and they do not use the same slots - the modules are keyed differently! If forced, you will damage or destroy the RAM and maybe the motherboard. There were only a very few "crossover" motherboards produced that supported both DDR2 and DDR3 and they had both DDR2 and DDR3 slots.

If you have DDR2 and you want to use DDR3, unless you have one of those rare crossover boards, you must buy a new motherboard that supports DDR3. And a new motherboard could require a different CPU and most likely, a new license for Windows too. If looking for a new board, then by all means, look for DDR3 support. And 6Gbit/s SATA and USB3.0 too. This will ensure you have a very current board.

But if you are looking to improve performance of your current machine my advice is if you have 2Gb of DDR2, bump it up to 4Gb by adding another 2Gb of DDR2 with similar specs. That will most likely give you a noticeable bump in performance - especially if using on-board graphics. And if you are using on-board graphics, in this graphics oriented world a new card will improve over all performance too. The more capable the graphics solution, the more tasks the CPU can hand off to it. And it takes little CPU horsepower to hand off tasks. Also, the card will have its own RAM, tweaked for graphics processing. This frees up the large chunk of system RAM previously snagged for the on-board GPU, in effect, giving you another little RAM boost. More RAM means the Page File on the slow hard drive is used less often. That saves wear and tear on the drive, and with more of the data in faster RAM it should, "in theory ", result in better performance too.

The downside to adding a card (or upgrading to a better card) is that graphics cards tend to be very power hungry, more so than CPUs. So when upgrading the graphics, often a new power supply is required to support it. So a little homework is required when upgrading graphics. We can help with that too, when time and budget permits.