Quake 3 definitely likes faster memory. As you can see in the diagram, we made it run 10% faster by simply reducing the memory timings.

The timings are less important for Unreal Tournament 2003. Nevertheless, aggressive memory settings help the Pentium 4 3.0GHz platform outperform the Pentium 4 3.2GHz one.

We see a very similar picture in Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter gaming benchmark.

Overall, we can state that the selection of memory modules is a keystone of a platform featuring Pentium 4 processor and 800MHz system bus. When the quality (and speed) of DDR400 SDRAM does not match the processor, your Pentium 4 won’t show you everything it can. Across a number of tests, we witness a platform with slower memory losing in performance to a platform with slower processor but faster memory.