In this article, which is going to get quite technical for you non techies, we're going to debate the issue of whether or not RAM latency matters when choosing memory for your computer. My apologies in advance if some of this stuff seems like it's out in the stars.

When people consider system memory, it is unfortunately an afterthought, next to the rest of the stuff you find in your computer. Many people who build PCs (and you know who you are) just put in whatever they can find as long as it works in "their" systems. Some builders however, take the opposite route and get these mega bucks ultra high frequency or low latency chips in the hopes that it will give their systems a big boost in performance. Don't worry, you pay for this bit of overkill.

It has gotten to the point that many major manufacturers offer special low latency memory. Kingston, one of the biggest manufacturers of computer memory chips, has their own low latency line called the HyperX DDR400 RAM. Pretty fancy name, wouldn't you say? Then you've got Crucial peddling their own low latency line they call Ballistix. Then there is OCZ Technologies which has actually sold low latency RAM chips for a very long time. And for the company Corsair, their XMS memory line boasts an "LL" designation for their low latency chips.

As I said, you pay for these little gems, to the tune of 30 to 100% more than for ordinary memory chips. But the big question is, are they worth the big bucks that you're shelling out for them? Well, fortunately there are testing companies out there that help us answer these kind of questions and tests were made on these low latency chips versus your ordinary run of the mill RAM chip.

To explain low latency first, in a brief and simple way, every chip you buy comes with what is called a clock rate, or how fast the chip will perform operations in your computer. Low latency means that the chip will actually run faster than this clock rate without having to overclock it because of the ultra high frequency the chips run on. So your computer runs faster. The question is, how much faster and does it make a noticeable enough difference in performance to justify the cost?

Without getting super technical here, when tests were conducted on various high end systems, which is where you need your highest performance boost, the improvements with low latency RAM chips came out to a meager 1% improvement in speed over regular RAM chips for the cheapest of the low latency chips and only a 3% improvement in speed over regular RAM chips for the most expensive. These tests were conducted on numerous high end systems with similar results for all.

Numbers don't lie, but you can draw your own conclusions from these tests. However, it is quite obvious from these results you're probably not getting what you paid for when buying these high end chips. You might want to save your money and invest in a better motherboard.