Seriously, I’ve always been asked why I put faster DDR3-1866 RAM with my AMD recommendations. That’s usually down to two things: higher bandwidth, room for tweaking and more headroom for a higher CPU overclock. For most people its better to just leave RAM timings at stock speeds, but a few enthusiasts will try to drop the speed of those kits in return for tighter timings and a lower voltage. Some people will go to extreme lengths to make their system “their own”.

So in the case of AMD, is it better to have faster RAM? I’ve always maintained that APU processors would benefit more from it as the integrated GPU shares RAM from the system. Builds with an APU and slower DDR3-1333 have shown markedly lower scores due to a bottleneck in speed and bandwidth. Since AMD has chosen to integrated the northbridge to the processor and squeeze in a working graphics core, things get strained when you’re playing a game and both the CPU and GPU tax the RAM. But what happens when you scale up above DDR3-1600? AMD itself recommends DDR3-1866 for the best performance, but does it really improve things? Tom’s Hardware went about testing that and I’ve posted some of the results below. 

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