Memory timings. Is lower ALWAYS better?

[Caxus]

Just curious if lower is supposed to always be better for each setting. Also, when people talk about memory timings, what order do they list them in? Because my motherboard goes CAS, TRCD, TRAS, TRP but i have a feeling that most people list the TRAS last since its always higher than the others.

So anyway, i can get mine down to 2-3-5-3 but i've noticed that its actually a bit faster when i go 2-3-6-3. Why do some people have a relatively high number in there sometimes even with high quality ram? I often see a 9 or an 11.

 

[agissi]

Ive never seen 9 or 11.

Also, the only reason why I can think 2-3-4-3 is slower then 2-3-6-3, is maybe your ram cant run at those latencys at its full speed, so it lowers the actual speed of the ram, allowing lower latencys.

 

[Didou]

Originally posted by Caxus
Why do some people have a relatively high number in there sometimes even with high quality ram? I often see a 9 or an 11.

The nForce 2 chipset performs better with TRAS set to any value from 9 to 11 when running in DualChannel mode. That's the only such case that I know of.

 

[abc]

I'm running an nforce 2 w/o dual channel and it is still faster (so the benchmarks say) with the TRAS set to 11. Other than that, the lower the better is what I've heard.