apps, this setting performs better than
2250MHz C18.
There is a perfectly reasonable
explanation for this, but suffice to say,
2,000MHz C15 in terms of absolute
latency (in time) is 7.5ns as opposed to
8ns at 2,250MHz C18. As such,
it is quite possible that an application
sensitive to this difference will yield a
performance advantage to the
4000MT/s C15 setting.
That said, the instances where
4000 C15 performs better are fewer
than when 4500 C18 is faster. It is
good to see that 4000 C15 can
deliver this performance, especially
if you have a motherboard which
isn't capable of much more than
this in frequency. In such instances
those performance number may be
of particular interest to you.
Overall, 4,500 C18 Tuned setting is
the better one and I am personally
using this setting on this motherboard
for every day operation. As always,
there are a few things you should be
aware of when choosing the higher
bandwidth setting (4,500 C18) and that
is motherboards will typically need a
higher cache line and system agent
voltage. Increasing the voltage for
these two lines will in turn raise your
average CPU operating temperature.
With commercially available DRAM
kits with transaction frequencies above
4800GT/s, there may not be that much
room for tuning the primary timings.
Manual tuning of the secondary and
tertiary timings however can go a long
way into offsetting this. With the right
board and competent memory, doing
this is simpler than you would think.
It is time consuming, but well worth it
especially if you’re wanting to extract
even more from your hardware but
still keep it essentially risk free.
On that note if I were to put together
a mini-ITX based gaming PC, I’d
certainly have this motherboard as
my first choice. There are of course
equally capable alternatives in the
memory oc department, but as a
package I’m not sure there’s one that
presents such a compelling overall
package. It’s a great motherboard
and with the right DRAM such as this
G.SKILL Trident Z kit you can get some
noticeable performance gains in your
applications by tuning these timings on
your memory.
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