How big of a benefit is faster DDR2 memory?

How big of a benefit is faster DDR2 memory?

If you sit in front of two identical machines, one configured with DDR2 533 MHz memory and the other with DDR2 667 MHz memory, you would not be able to tell the difference without the use of benchmarks.

In fact, even in the benchmarks that make the difference look as big as possible, there's never any more than a 20% difference between the two. With the average system application, the difference is less than 3%, which is below the threshold of being noticeable.

Latency and bandwidth work hand in hand for memory performance. Faster memory can be crippled by high latency. Memory timings are usually in sets of 3 or 4. CL4 (Clock Latency 4) might look like 4-4-4 or 4-4-4-12. The first number is most important, and when you see CLx the x is the first number. The lower the number, the faster the memory can react to new data.

In conclusion, there is no real performance difference between DDR2 533 and DDR2 667. When DDR2 800 makes it to laptops, that will be no different. The amount of memory and speed of the CPU are much more important factors in overall system performance.