I have CL36 5600 ram, 32 gb.  With my new rig it defaulted to 4800.  Is this normal?  Worth cranking to 5600?  I wasn't sure if I would notice real life improvements.

What is the CPU of your computer? Without XMP (Intel) or EXPO (AMD) being enabled in the BIOS it will default to the JEDEC standard that the chip is designed for, in your case DDR5-4800. You need to activate the feature in the BIOS and then choose the RAM speed in the options it provides.

As for the performance, you'll lose ~2-3% of performance, measurable but not really felt in most cases.

XMP, turn it on. Unless the CPU memory controller is rubbish, it should work.

CPU is i7 13700k. Should work with higher speed. I'll activate the xmp this evening. Thanks guys.

It will not really be noticeable, but turn on XMP anyways, especially newer games might take more advantage of those higher RAM speeds. Though for now I don't think your RAM clock speed is not even remotely close in being a potential bottleneck. However you might get 1 FPS more if you play uncapped.

It will vary from game to game.
It will mostly effect the 1% lows, more so than that avg fps.

Low latency is good on memory, which is what "cranking it to 5600" would do (compaired to 4800).
You could then manually tighten the timings, if your confortable with tons of stress testing and stability finding.

Linus Tech Tips has a video about "does ram speed really matter (ddr5 edition)?"

In it he shows Cyberpunk 2077 going from 187fps -> 205fps (4800 cl40-> 5600 cl36) (about 10% avg. fps increase) (on a amd system)
The minimum fps (1% lows) go from 119fps -> 137fps (over 15%)

So yes.... you should load the right profile for your ram.
If not, your looking at about 10-15% "less" performance, and less stable fps while gaming.


Fast ram is esp good for competitive shooters, when you already run fast fps, and have a monitor that can work it.
Its less impactfull if your running something "heavy" graphically, at 4k, and your barely able to break say 60fps.
(granted, that close to 60fps, any gain is good, even if its smaller by %)

Also for some reason, amd systems seem to benefit more from ram speeds than intel ones.
However amd systems seem to not gain much of anything past the 6000-6400 speeds (currently).
While on Intel, gains are smaller, but you can keep cranking up past say DDR5 7800 speeds and still see small gains.

Free 6-8% performance in avg fps :)
Why not, imo.  Like you bought the ram at that speed to be able to use it at those speeds, might as well.

Ram speed importance depends on:

1) Game.
2) CPU memory controller.

It will smooth out those low points in frame time and frame rates.

In saying that, if you keep latency the same and boost clockrates on your Ram, latency will actually reduce as latency is calculated on a clock-cycle basis and that itself can produce some nice results.

In short, increase your memory speed using XMP, you will get some gains.

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Often a slow CPU+Fast Ram can beat a faster CPU+slow ram, situation depending of course.

In your case though, it's free, so you might as well enable it.

Keep in mind that Linus has been caught out with dodgy data and benchmarking fairly recently.



Just like Red Gaming Tech and Moore Law is Dead... (Although Linus is far more credible than those idiots...) I would steer away from Linus in the short term.

hmm I recently got a new laptop with ddr5 ram and didn't even think to check at what clock speed it's running at as assumed it be the speed it says lol.

what happen to the good old days where you trust things to run as specified an not needing to change settings lol.

Lol. Same here.  I just assumed the PC would boot up at the listed 5600.