 Corsair RM series power supplies are optimized for silent operation. Click now to learn more. I get asked so often, Linus what RAM should I get, what speed RAM should I get, what capacity RAM should I get. So capacity is pretty simple. That's how many things you can have going at the same time. So you look at your current system, how much RAM you have, how much your utilization is, how much more would you like to be able to utilize, there you go. If you're not using professional applications like DaVinci Resolve and After Effects and Premiere All at the same time, you're probably good with anywhere from 8 to 16 gigs of RAM for quite a while. Now when it gets into speed, things get quite a bit more complicated because it's phenomenally confusing for people who don't know much about RAM speed. There's frequency, which will go anywhere on DDR3 from around 1333 all the way up to 3000 MHz. And then there's latencies, which are different. So frequency predominantly affects the maximum bandwidth, so that's how much data can be transferred to and from it at a time. Whereas latency predominantly affects how quickly it can respond to a request. So these two things can affect performance in different applications in different ways. However, how much they affect things, you might be surprised that it really isn't as much as you might expect. So what we decided to do was we took some high performance DDR3 2.4 GHz memory. So that's 2400 MHz memory and we ran it at 800 MHz. We ran it at 1333 MHz, 1600 MHz at what I'd consider to be a typical CAS latency 9, so CL9, 1600 at CL8. We tend to pay a little bit of a premium for a CL8 kit versus a 1600 kit. 1866 and then for good measure at 2400 MHz. Then what we did is, so we ran two games as well as Cinebench, just to give you some idea how it runs in games versus synthetics. So here you can see the graph in front of me, which basically goes, OK, well, if you're looking at the same capacity RAM, running all these different applications and different speeds, you're looking at not a whole lot of difference in performance. Because what often happens with higher bandwidth, so that is higher frequency RAM, is that it tends to sacrifice latency. And then as you tighten up latencies, you tend to sacrifice the maximum frequency to the point where they actually cancel each other out a lot. And you end up spending more money for higher frequency RAM that might look better on paper, but doesn't really deliver much in terms of a better performance number in the real world. Even our DDR3-800, which you actually can't really buy. We couldn't even find that. Even our DDR3-800 isn't really so much slower that it's going to make a difference. So with that said, let's bring up the next graph, which is the amount, the number of dollars you're paying per FPS. We took our gaming benchmarks and we graphed how much it's costing you per FPS because the frames per second didn't really change. The performance didn't change much, so spending more was basically just spending more. And there are reasons why you might want better memory. So for example, if you like the aesthetic of a particular RAM kit versus another one, that would be a reason to spend more money on it. Or if it has like cool lighting effects on it, for example, that might be another reason to spend more money. But beyond that, the way that I personally shop for money, shop for money, yeah, I shop for money. The way I personally shop for RAM is I look for a brand that I trust, so it should come with a lifetime warranty if it's worth its salt. It should be something that you can't find a whole lot of, oh yeah, this all failed on me or whatever else, because most of the good brands out there have pretty good reputations these days. There's been a lot of consolidation. A lot of the bad RAM companies are just gone. And that's really what I look for. And who has a special edition RAM that matches my other board really well? Stuff like that. So there you go, guys. That is my take on memory. Yes, there are situations where more memory bandwidth is needed and you can't possibly have enough. Most of these exist more like in servers, not really in desktop environments. Leave a like on the video if you liked it, leave a dislike if you disliked it, and leave a comment if the results were not something you were expecting to see. And as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.