So I built my i7 920 system last september. At the time I got Corsair Dominator ram with specs of 1600 MHZ with timings of 8-8-8-24. Now, I have been finding similar RAM modules on newegg that have timings of 7-7-7-20 at the same frequency. Could anybody tell me if this makes much difference in the performance of games? Would the impact of latencies be relatively minimal like a few percent, or could it potentially have an effect that is proportional to the difference in latency?

Thanks in advance. System specs are below.

Core i7 920 OC to 3.8 GHZ
6 gigs Corsair Dominator; RAM frequency 1522(auto) MHZ w/ timings 8-8-8-24
EVGA x58 LE SLI MB
2x GTX 480 dual SLI
Corsair 850 watt PSU

You can try the tighter timing but make sure to run Memtest86+ first before booting Windows to prevent any problems.

I doubt you will see much of a performance difference for gaming. For distributed computing and benchmarking, the tighter timings do help.

thanks for the responses. Yes I have tried cutting it down to 7-7-7-20 and it choked on start up. I wasnt even able to get into the BIOS, but hitting the clear cmos button took care of it. I haven't tried 7-7-7-24 but if it makes no difference I don't think I will even try... I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing out on something by not having newer RAM.

One more thing though, could someone tell me if there there is any advantage to clocking the ram higher than the board does in automatic mode? When i OC'd to 3.8 I tried to just set the RAM to 1600 MHZ but after i selected it, it appeared as something like 2250 MHZ or whatever. So I decided to just go with the automatic selection of 1522 MHZ. If the current CPU clock does not prescribe a higher RAM clock, would it do any good to increase the clock just for the heck of it?

I have found on the Corsair Dominator 1600 MHz that if you down clock the memory while overclocking your processor you can then drop the memory timings.  The particular module you have can run at 1450 on 7-7-7-20 1T XMP, but that depends on your CPU clock also.