Does Laptop RAM Speed Effect Integrated Graphics Performance

[corndog2000]

I read that if you have dual channel and higher speed RAM it improves the performance of AMD APUs and I was wondering if it applies for Intel integrated graphics. I have an Intel i5-3210m and was wondering if higher speed RAM would be worth the performance upgrade.

 

[MarkW]

Yes.

Integrated GPU's only have system RAM to utilize.

 

[Shaun o]

It would speed things up slightly.
But the main reason why a dedicated graphics card has its own Gddr 5 ram on the card it`s self is to do with
Bandwidth or how wide the data bus is in bit`s between the Gpu and the memory situated on the card.
The fatter the pipe, or data bus in numbers the more data you can pass through the bus, in a shorter amount of time,one data pass, cycle or refresh, at a larger volume of data.

When you use on board system memory, for example DDR 3 @ any speed.
And for example a APU or cpu with a Gpu solution, the problem is how wide the data bus is.
Depending on the motherboard and the config of DDR 3 main system memory, amount of ram sticks and memory pairing modes.
64 bit`s in single channel mode
128 bits dual channel mode.
256 bits quad channel mode.
So in effect

Apu or gpu is limited on bus or data width due to system memory, or what people call a bottle neck of data where x amount of Data is slowed down due to a difference in bus or data processing width.

Most new graphics cards have a higher quality of dedicated ram, capacity, and the bus or bit width is often larger to cope compared to what a on board cpu/apu/gpu solution provides as it`s specs.
That greatly speeds up performance in data manipulation and processing in many ways.

Going from say single channel memory system config to dual or quad channel mode would help in some way and a higher speed rating of your DDR 3 main system memory.
Again though it is dependent on the bit or bus width of the apu or gpu data bus internal to the combined cpu/ gpu solution processor you use.
Amd or Intel based.

 

[k1114]

But since you can't oc you can only go up to 1600. Your laptop shouldn't have less than 1333 so the small speed increase won't help.

 

[jaguarskx]

Intel chipsets do not support RAM faster than DDR3L 1600. Using faster RAM means it will either not work or will be simply down clocked to 1600.

Having two sticks of RAM so they can work in dual channel mode can help improve performance by around 5% - 10%.

 

[MarkW]

Intel chipsets do not support RAM faster than DDR3L 1600. Using faster RAM means it will either not work or will be simply down clocked to 1600.

Having two sticks of RAM so they can work in dual channel mode can help improve performance by around 5% - 10%.

Maybe that is true on a laptop, but it is not true on the desktop. And since more than a few laptops use mobile versions of the desktop CPU's I have doubts about that too.

 

[jaguarskx]

I should clarify that there will be a 5% - 10% improvement in game performance when using integrated graphics because in dual channel mode the RAM will be operating at full speed rather than half speed.