Compare DDR3 1333 and 1600 RAM

Assem­bling a com­put­er at first glance is only a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult than assem­bling some kind of design­er. I took a more mod­ern “moth­er­board”, plugged in a proces­sor suit­able for the sock­et, “RAM” a cou­ple of dice, a video card, a pow­er sup­ply, a hard dri­ve, launched all this good­ness and you are sit­ting, chat­ting in VK.

But in prac­tice, it turns out that you need to take into account a lot of sub­tleties! For exam­ple, the fre­quen­cy of RAM. For per­for­mance, it is impor­tant to choose com­po­nents that are ide­al­ly suit­ed in terms of para­me­ters, and with a lim­it­ed bud­get, try not to fly into the pipe by buy­ing a cou­ple of dies.

There­fore, in this arti­cle we will ana­lyze what is the dif­fer­ence between DDR3 1333 and 1600 RAM, and which is bet­ter to buy.

Some theoretical background

Despite the fact that the expres­sion “clock speed” is most often used in rela­tion to the proces­sor, this is the main para­me­ter that deter­mines the speed of the entire com­put­er and its indi­vid­ual com­po­nents. True, with respect to oth­er func­tion­al ele­ments, not only the actu­al “stone”.

A com­put­er is a machine for pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion. It con­stant­ly over­takes a huge amount of data, stores it in dif­fer­ent places and per­forms all sorts of oper­a­tions with it. And the data is trans­mit­ted over the bus­es.

Bus­es can be thought of as sim­ply wires run­ning from one com­put­er node to anoth­er. For exam­ple, from RAM to the proces­sor. Or from the hard dri­ve to the chipset, and from there to the video card. The data itself is encod­ed as a dig­i­tal sig­nal, or cur­rent puls­es. There is a cur­rent on the bus — “one”. No cur­rent — “zero”. And all this is then processed and turned into famil­iar things. For exam­ple, in these let­ters.

How­ev­er, such a sys­tem has one prob­lem — the com­po­nents should “agree” on what peri­od of time to con­sid­er as a sig­nal. Well, there is cur­rent — and there is. Is it one “unit”? Two? Eight? The solu­tion is to poll the bus at a cer­tain fre­quen­cy.

Let’s say the polling rate is set to 200 times per sec­ond. If all this time there was a cur­rent on the bus, then 200 “units” were received. And this polling fre­quen­cy is the clock fre­quen­cy (TC).

The high­er the clock fre­quen­cy – the more data can be trans­ferred on the bus per sec­ond. How­ev­er, before the infor­ma­tion exchange begins, the com­po­nents, again, “agree” on the PM. The proces­sor informs the chipset that it can receive data 3200 times per sec­ond (3.2 GHz). RAM – which is 1600 times per sec­ond (1.6 GHz). And then the chipset deter­mines at what speed what to trans­mit to whom.

So the over­all speed of the com­put­er is deter­mined not by the PM of the proces­sor (as many mis­con­cep­tions say), but by the PM of the slow­est bus. You can plug in some Intel Core i9-9900KS, 64 GB of the fastest “RAM” of the DDR4 fam­i­ly and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edi­tion, and put an IDE hard dri­ve on top — and the unfor­tu­nate com­put­er will lag and freeze like in the 90s .

And now you can go direct­ly to the RAM.

RAM DDR3 1333

The DDR3 1333 RAM is clocked at 667MHz. At the same time, the actu­al speed of the dri­ve is 1333 mega­trans­fers per sec­ond. That is, 1.3 mil­lion sig­nals are trans­mit­ted in 1 sec­ond.

This PM ensures high reli­a­bil­i­ty of the RAM. In addi­tion, the dies them­selves heat up very lit­tle, which is very impor­tant for sys­tems with unsuc­cess­ful cool­ing of these com­po­nents.

667 MHz IF is enough to run office com­put­ers and some old­er games.

DDR3 1600 RAM

DDR3 1600 RAM is clocked at 800 MHz. The actu­al dri­ve speed is 1600 mega­trans­fers per sec­ond.

This PM pro­vides a fair­ly high per­for­mance. In addi­tion, if the die design­er has tak­en care of the cir­cuit­ry, the heat­ing will also be neg­li­gi­ble. But in some cas­es, you will have to sep­a­rate­ly orga­nize the air­flow of the dri­ve.

800 MHz IF is enough for some old­er games (for 2019, when DDR4 is wide­ly dis­trib­uted), as well as for com­plex com­put­ing oper­a­tions like archiv­ing or unpack­ing archives.

What is the difference and which one to choose?

So, the dif­fer­ence between 1333 and 1600 is in the clock fre­quen­cy and heat­ing inten­si­ty. Well, and, accord­ing­ly, in per­for­mance.

How­ev­er, the choice is not as sim­ple as it seems. The fact is that with the release of DDR3, the RAM con­troller began to be installed direct­ly into the proces­sor. And the max­i­mum com­pat­i­ble PM is deter­mined by this par­tic­u­lar chip.

So, for exam­ple, Intel Core proces­sors of the Ivy Bridge fam­i­ly show a sharp drop in per­for­mance when switch­ing to 1333. This man­i­fests itself both in com­put­ing oper­a­tions with data (archiv­ing / unar­chiv­ing) and in games. But the “chips” AMD Phe­nom, in prin­ci­ple, can­not work with 1600 with­out unlock­ing the mul­ti­pli­er.

Thus, the choice of RAM should be based on com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with the planned (or already avail­able) proces­sor. For the Intel Core fam­i­ly, it is bet­ter to imme­di­ate­ly take a high-speed one — the risk of “mis­cal­cu­lat­ing” is min­i­mal. And for AMD Phe­nom, buy­ing a 1600 may turn out to be a com­plete waste of mon­ey.

Let’s com­pare the types of “RAM”.

It is also worth con­sid­er­ing that the speed of all mem­o­ry sticks is deter­mined by the speed of the small­est. That is, if it is set, for exam­ple, three pieces 1600 and one 1333, then the max­i­mum speed will be just 1333.