Firstly, to clarify, there's nothing very special about 'gaming ram' other than the particular chunk of silicon performs better than others so they stuck a shin

Firstly, to clarify, there's nothing very special about 'gaming ram' other than the particular chunk of silicon performs better than others so they stuck a shiny sticker and an oversized heatsink on. The problem here is the latency is state dependent and who knows what people are talking about here. The memory itself can have a latency 1-3x the CAS Latency number and you need to understand how DRAM is accessed to appreciate why. Which will also clarify why an L3 cache is such a good idea. > For a completely unknown memory access (AKA Random access), the relevant latency is the time to close any open row, plus the time to open the desired row, followed by the CAS latency to read data from it. (It's actually worse than than for DDR5.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_timings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_timings https://www.anandtech.com/show/3851/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-sdram-memory-but-were-afraid-to-ask/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/3851/everything-you-always-wa... Then you've got some small time going to and from the controller, which might also be doing some address translation, maybe some access reordering to avoid switching rows. I think 30ns is very optimistic.