Somewhere down the line I'm going to upgrade to Ivy Bridge (or whatever the 22nm Sandy Bridge update is called), but since DDR3 seems like it's at its all-time low in price right now, I've been buying good deals I come across. I see these deals for high speed "enthusiast" DDR3 ram all the time, but what is the point of these? Unless I'm wrong, the memory speed and cpu clock speed is completely uncoupled now right? If you were trying to overclock the CPU, you're no longer forced to overclock the ram at the same time anymore?

Take a look at this:
viewtopic.php?p=533209#p533209

and this

viewtopic.php?p=533696#p533696

There are also some benchmarks on Bit-tech.net about memory bandwidth and latency in the Sandy Bridge era, you might give them a look.

Bit-Tech on the best memory for SNB

Will the sweet spot for Ivy Bridge be shifted higher? Who knows.

There is a discussion here that the sweet spot is drifting lower... or maybe staying stable and available speeds increase.

viewtopic.php?p=533209#p533209
viewtopic.php?p=533696#p533696

Can you post those links a third time? I may not have seen them, yet

Oops

Thanks for the links guys. It looks like the story really hasn't changed much when it comes to performance gains coming directly from faster ram, if going by that bit-tech link. It still seems like a faster cpu clock goes much farther in speeding up your system. Before, faster ram let you get those higher cpu clocks but it just doesn't seem necessary now. Unless you REALLY want that small extra bump in performance.

Exactly, the factor is so small that it can be safely ignored. By faster RAM if you find that the price doesn't differ much at the time you're buying, but don't pay a lot more and expect to notice any difference in the end. Next up is AMD's Bulldozer line that will standardise at 1866MHz, but I'd be surprised if there will be more than a measurable loss to go with todays mass volume speed 1333 that upgraders may already be well stocked on.