What is all that ram that's faster than pc3200 for?

[Caxus]

This is something i've never really understood. I used to just think that you buy the fastest ram that your motherboard/FSB can use. Over the last few years (for amd based boards) this went from 266 to 333 and now to 400. I have yet to see a motherboard that lists past 400 so i'm wondering what all these other types of ram that are faster than pc3200 are for. Does it just let you "overclock" easier since its rated faster? For example if i buy pc3500 ram instead of pc3200 does that mean i can clock my ram up to 433 easier whereas that speed might be unstable on pc3200? There's got to be something i'm missing here because otherwise why would anyone buy pc3200 when they could get faster ram for almost the same price?

[Thrax]

It's overclocker's memory. It does allow you to reach higher front side bus speeds, provided your board can supply it. Many Athlon XP nforce2-boards can do 220MHz (DDR440), many Pentium 4 boards can do 250MHz (DDR500), and many Athlon 64 boards can do 300MHz (DDR600), so you buy memory that can accomodate.

[TheGr81]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's its only purpose. You may have a hard time OCing with PC3200, but PC4000 should go staright to 250MHz without a hitch.

[Caxus]

So whats the catch? Why shouldn't i just buy ram thats rated at 566 for my k8t neo and just see how high i can go? As far as i can tell there doesn't seem to be much of a price difference.

[Thrax]

The only catch (If you want to call it that) is that high-speed overclocking RAM is very much not created equally.

Your best bet? OCZ Pc3700 Platinum.

[muddocktor]

Here's some performance graphs from a recent Anandtech article on memory performance and A64 for you:

[yagga]

latencies increase on the newer faster ram as well

[muddocktor]

latencies increase on the newer faster ram as well

DDR2, yes. But not on the ram I posted the graphs on, which is regular DDR, but it is capable of running much faster than the PC3200 specs.

[yagga]

I guess I meant you can get lower latency ram at the 3200 spot since there are so many different kinds of ram made at that speed, like Corsair XMS choices. But maybe you are right, I havn't looked into ram for a little while.