My memory defaults to 5-5-5-18 at 1.9V on my MOBO. It passes memtest 24+ hours at that setting.

 

My memory is designed to run at 4-4-4-12 at 2.1V. At those settings, it also passes memtest 24+ hours.

 

I'm curious though, does anyone know if the faster timings would have any benefit under unRAID? I've been running at 5-5-5-18 for about the last 2 years now with no problems. But if there's any sort of performance gain (like faster reads and writes), then I'd switch to the faster timings. But if there's no difference (or not noticeable enough), I'd rather stick at the slower timings to save power and lower heat output from the RAM.

As you already know and stated, you will get slightly faster memory performance. As to how that translates to real world performance, it depends on how often you're constrained by memory bandwidth and latency.

for unRAID the memory speed is hardly a bottleneck. I would suggest using the slower timings and saving electricity. For unRAID's usage, there will be no noticeable difference.

 

However, if you are running vmware which can may need to access large chunks of memory and CPU then there could be a noticeable. albeit small, difference.

Thanks for the replies guys. I figured it probably wouldn't make a noticeable difference... thought I'd ask anyways though.

 

I'm currently not running VMware so I'll leave it at 5-5-5-18 1.9V and call it a day. It's been stable for about 2 years now so there's no reason to start changing things for a very minor, if any, speed increase.