CAS latency doesn't matter for basic productivity.

No. For basic productivity — email, web browsing, Office apps, Slack — RAM capacity is what actually helps. Latency is a tuning detail for gamers and video editors.

When you go from 8GB to 16GB, you’re fixing a real problem: running out of memory. That alone will make your computer feel snappier. CAS timings (like CL16 vs CL18) affect how fast the RAM responds to a request, but the difference is tiny — often under 1% real-world speed for the stuff you described. You won’t notice it.

Where latency does show up is in frame rates in games or render times in Premiere. Even then, it’s a few percent at most. For basic productivity, the bottleneck is almost never RAM speed — it’s having enough RAM so you’re not hitting the swap file. So buy the cheapest DDR4 or DDR5 kit that matches your motherboard’s specs and move on.

Don’t overthink the numbers on the sticker. Just get more RAM.