What Does a Lower tRD Really Provide?
Up until this point we have spent a lot of time writing about the “performance improvement” available by changing just tRD. First, let’s define the gain: lower tRD settings result in lower associated TRD values (at equivalent FSB clocks), which allow for a lower memory read latency time, ultimately providing a higher memory read speed (MB/s). Exactly how a system tends to respond to this increase in available bandwidth remains to be seen, as this is largely dependent on just how sensitive the application/game/benchmark is to variations in memory subsystem performance. It stands to reason that more bandwidth and lower latencies cannot possibly be a bad thing, and we have yet to encounter a situation in which any improvement (i.e. decrease) in tRD has ever resulted in lower observed performance. EVEREST – a popular diagnostics, basic benchmarking, and system reporting program – gives us a means for quantifying the change in memory read rates experienced when directly altering tRD though
