Which RAM timing is better

CL16-18-18-36
or
CL20-22-22
otherwise their very similar.

Lower numbers, when it comes to timings and latency, is better. Depending on your workload, there might not be any difference in performance at all. But applications like games are very sensitive to latency. Don’t expect more than low single digit performance boost numbers though.

Price, capacity and to a certain degree memory clock speed are much more important stats on memory.

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I was leaning towards the Crucial kit and was just uncertain of which was better.

(Yes my machine can handle 3200 MT/s, 2x32GB and the 1.35v of the Crucial)

I don’t have any expertise with SO-DIMMs (for laptops), but Crucial (retail brand of Micron) Ballistix have a good reputation with normal DIMMs. And always take the ones with lower CL (CAS Latency) when all other stats are equal.

The higher the frequency, the higher the latency usually gets. So always compare sticks with equal frequency, e.g. 3200MT/s. Otherwise you end up buying DDR2 RAM with CL8 “because the timings are so great” :slight_smile:

As I said above…it’s usually better to buy higher frequency RAM or more capacity than to buy expensive RAM with ultra-low timings. Timings are nice to have, but nothing I would spend lots of money on.

You can always use the formula “(CAS latency/RAM clock speed) x 2000 = latency in nanoseconds”

But at the end it might have little to no effect on your experience. However, I’m bias toward Kingston. Almost always used Kingstone for the RAM in all my builds.

If you get more capacity RAM, the slower (meaning higher numbers) the memory latency gets. You could offset some of the performance loss by getting a faster clocked MT/s (Sometimes incorrectly as labelled as MHz or even Mb/s).

For AMD, I dont think you can get meaningful performance gain above 3800 MT/s. AFAIK, this is because of the speed limit of the infinity fabric between the RAM and CPU (2x1900MT/s).

For Intel, the higher the MT/s, the better it is.

My laptops RAM specifications feature a maximum of 3200 MT/s, max capacity of 64GB (2x32GB) and a power limit of 1.35v. Within these parameters, I believe these kits are the best of the available solutions. And owing to my own bias (long track record with Crucial), better timings and even lower price, I’m going with the Crucial kit.

Thank you all.

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