OC3D Article: 3GB, GB & 12GB DDR3 Investigated

[w3bbo]

With the advent of a triple channel memory controller on Intel's latest CPU, enthusiasts have been forced to ask a new question: Which memory configuration is best?



Read the full article here.

[monkey7]

Lol at the photos with all the ram. And 200 quid for 12GB, I paid that for 6GB 1333MHz. Prices are really dropping now.

Nice and unique review, really sheds some light on questions which are asked a lot and answered rarely.

[themcman1]

That was a really good review - I really enjoyed reading that.

I want to have enough RAM to take photos like that though.

[Rastalovich]

Outstanding article.

The large leap in the price from 6g to 12g as opposed to the leap from 3g to 6g really pushes the business requirements for the largest kit. The CS4 results show they'll get reward for it professionally in terms of time over work hours. Even tho 6g will do a great job, 12g plus the cost, minus perhaps the vat and time saved would make it viable.

(*cough* most of ours still use 2g in the main, with 4g if they're lucky - don't know of any 8g machines - 775 ofc) If the heads of the departments concerned really had their heads around the figures, they'd be more concerned with maxing the memory of their pcs rather than paying over the odds for a retailed pc with an nvidiafx card that will relatively not help them as much. Go figure.

From what I can see as far as the gamer is concerned, 3g is no issue, particularly for those who fps the majority of the time. I'd perhaps throw in an argument of certain games utilizing more memory over others. 6g for £95 or so in the present climate is surprizingly cheap, meaning I expected it to cost a whole lot more.

I think it will get to a stage where 6g is so cheap that considering u've spent 100s on ur mobo and cpu, a matter of 10s of pounds between 3 and 6 would make it a non-issue and covers more bases.

I'm glad u did an OS reinstall between memory switches, there would have been many complications otherwize.

Great stuff.

[w3bbo]

Cheers for the comments guys.

This was perhaps the biggest, most time consuming article/review I have done thus far. As we have not done a test on this magnetude to date, a lot of experimentation was used to find the optimum testing procedures, image and video sizes etc because, as you say Rast, without a re-install, there were anomolies and strange results that didn't match what I was expecting. Not only that but passing filters over a 4gb image with 3GB of ram ground the system to a halt whereas 12 GB found it a breeze, if somewhat time consuming.

I used each kit for a week's worth of 'everyday' computing. 12GB is definately worth it if you are working with large files and although most of the benchmarks don't significantly back this up, simply opening and closing programs, general vista use etc made the expereince so 'slick'.

[Rastalovich]

If u still have the 12g in-house, it'd be interesting if u could create a ram disk and run a game off it. Dunno how u'd do that with Vista.

[PeterStoba]

One of the most informative articles i've read in a long time, it seems 6GB is what I should choose ;0

[AntiHeroUK]

A very well thought out and in depth review. Looks like the 6GB is the best bet for anyone going down the i7 route and the way prices are currently it would be silly not to.

Keep up the good work w3bbo

[n0nsense]

Although it is nice to see such review, i think you miss some point.

As far as i know, there is very little to no difference between single dual and triple channel mode. So even if you do own i7, you can still live with normal dual channel kits. this will give you some flexibility with amount of memory.

The second point is that as you shown, there are few applications that can utilise (benefit) from large RAM. I can think only about large projects in CAD applications in addition to Photoshop. But if we put benchmarking aside and come to real life world, my guess is that i'm not the only person that does not like to restart computer. Smaller number even take one step further and do not close applications since they probably will want to use them again before restarting the system.

In this scenario you can end with slow and unresponsive system if you don't have enough RAM.

I have only one computer with MS OS and it is Win 7 64 bit with 3 GB of ram.

2x1GB + 2x512MB. It is used as my personal desktop at work. The most Used applications are Browsers and Office suits. If i open 1 tab and one document it is not a problem. But usually after few days after restart i endup with 20+ tabs + 2-4 Text documents , 1-2 presentations and 2-5 spreadsheets. Of course there is antivirus , music player, VMware infrastructure client, Visual Studio, Source and bug control software and others.

Each one can run fine on 2,1 or even 0.5 GB setup. But put them all together and i find myself looking what can be closed in order to make system more responsive. RAM usage is usually above 85%.

Rest of my computers are Linux based and can't be directly compared to MS since memory management is different and OS memory footprint is significantly lower. (less then 100MB with at least 600MB for vista and 7).

So the benefit from large RAM depends on usage pastern.

Another aspect is RAM disk which is very nice, but i cant see how it can be implemented with 10+GB vista and 7 installation. So it's more for NIX users.

To summarise, for most of us it is nice/must to have 4-6 GB for comfortable usage. Those with special needs like CAD or Photoshop processing large files should get as much as possible.

[w3bbo]

Originally Posted by name='n0nsense'

Although it is nice to see such review, i think you miss some point.

As far as i know, there is very little to no difference between single dual and triple channel mode.

Sorry m8, no offence but I stopped reading at that point