RAM capacity or speed?

hey guys ive noticed that 8gb of 2133mhz dominator gt is about the same price as 16gb or 1866mhz vengeance!

so capacity or speed guys?

its for an ivy bridge rig so running 4 populated dims isnt a problem the memory controller is rock solid!

thanks

Is it for gaming (8gb of 2133mhz dominator) or vid editing (16gb or 1866mhz vengeance)

Yeah for gaming speed is more important, for editing or rendering capacity is important.

yeah gaming so i guess dominators it is then thanks

Might have been a bit slow seeing this... but speed makes virtually no difference to gaming either. You will barely be able to measure the difference in fps between 1866 and 2133 let alone actually feel it in game (were talking a fraction of an fps here). For gaming you just need 8gb of 1600.

In fact, unless you are a professional who needs to knock off 15secs from his/her video/music production you don't need anything more than 1600 imo.

Master&Puppet said:

Might have been a bit slow seeing this... but speed makes virtually no difference to gaming either. You will barely be able to measure the difference in fps between 1866 and 2133 let alone actually feel it in game (were talking a fraction of an fps here). For gaming you just need 8gb of 1600.

In fact, unless you are a professional who needs to knock off 15secs from his/her video/music production you don't need anything more than 1600 imo.

Click to expand...

We could infact use a similar argument for capacity.

Gaming wize, you'll be stretched to use more than even 4g. Whereas for editing stuff, things can get out of hand.

Double barreled question me thinks.

Speed !

EDIT: and let's not mixup 1600mhz with PC3-16000.

Oh yes I very much agree. As an example I know that a recent skyrim patch allowed the game to address upto 4gb of memory. Whether this has much of an impact of gaming I'm not sure.

Many games are still written for the lowest common denominator - 32 bit systems, which can't see 8gb anyway so the 32bit games aren't likely to address more than 2gb.

If you have a 64 bit os then it doesnt hurt to get 8gb since ram is quite cheap but regardless of this RAM is the very last thing to consider worrying about when upgrading a system (within reason of course).

Clicky Linky

8gb will give you better alt-tabbing performance though

gotta disagree Ras. When i was running 2x2GB some games would always pop me out with a mem error saying it was a mem usage issue. I could always get back in without issue but when i went to 2x4GB it has never happened. Now this was mainly with Cyrsis 2 cant recall any other game doing this. Plus more ram will allow you to use part of it as a ram disk greatly improving performance with whatever program you use it for. So say you use 16Gb of ram and take 4GB of it to use as a ram disk for say a certain game or vid editing you could in fact gain a huge performance boost. I've seen ram disk do 1700mb/s reads and the rest of the numbers aint shabby either lol. wanna say writes were at 100mb/sec as well and 4k performance thru the roof. So capacity can do wonders for a rig if used properly.

S_I_N said:

gotta disagree Ras. When i was running 2x2GB some games would always pop me out with a mem error saying it was a mem usage issue. I could always get back in without issue but when i went to 2x4GB it has never happened.

Click to expand...

The difference I generally find is that I don't do anything on a gaming computer other than game. I do everything else on other systems.

However, I stare at the g15's memory display whilst I play and the 8g currently in there is an absolute waste in this rig. If it passes say... 15% of 8g? I'd be shocked. (and I test/play everything *eventually*, when I get chance ) - I could have 2/3 faulty sticks and never find out

On a previous 775 rig with 4g, the biggest amount of memory I'd EVER seen used is around 75%, which was something like fifa manager and all the leagues selected - ish. I've never - in my life - had a game crap out on me cos of memory since the 2g days.

For sure, I look at this computer I'm on here (i5/4g) and it's using 1.5g doing internet stuff/office etc.

But I mean, if you use a rig for everything AND your gaming, and want to leave stuff on whilst you play - I can see the anxiety. My answer is, close down IE - using 150m+, close office, close mediacenter, close whatever - you're using a game. (and you've b1tched about wanting the best cpu for gaming, but never asked about best cpu for gaming - and btw I wanna leave crap running on my desktop).

We have to remember that the games are (in the massive majority) 32bit, and have only the addressing capablilty of 32bit, they can't do psuedo 64bit like you could with motorola 16bit cpus doing psuedo 32bit. So everything the game needs to finger, has to be within a 32bit window. The game will know and can deal with an address that is between 0-4096m (not absolute). If you got 64bit windows, this makes no difference, other than the apps in addition to the game can use the 4096-8g (not continuous obviously).

Get the cheapest and largest sticks you can find.

People with 2.4Ghz sticks under water and/ or a hilarious little fan wherring above them bewilder me.

S_I_N said:

So say you use 16Gb of ram and take 4GB of it to use as a ram disk for say a certain game or vid editing you could in fact gain a huge performance boost. I've seen ram disk do 1700mb/s reads and the rest of the numbers aint shabby either lol. wanna say writes were at 100mb/sec as well and 4k performance thru the roof.

Click to expand...

on 2133 RAM 4250 with 8GB disk which is kinda quicker than my

RAID, SSD and abbacus. and JJ with his 2600 trident showed 7000 reads.

which does make me wonder if too fast can be a "bottleneck" for the other

support systems in the PC. or is this a non-issue?

airdeano

Gaming : Speed

Im thinking I'm going to go with sin's idea with 16gb in two sets of Corsair vengeance 8gb 1866mhz cl9 kits. And I'll get one jet black and one red kit.

Then the colour scheme will look awesome with my rog gene board!

Well ramdisking is a different kettle of fish!

It's awesome but depending on the games you play you might want more than 16gb for that - if you play something like shogun 2 or have lots of texture mods for skyrim then you will be looking at the better part of 20gb for the game alone. Then add 4gb for the OS to sit comfortably in. Then all of a sudden you're looking at getting 32gb.

Ramdisking is a little bit gimmicky though. It's easy to just get the standard 8gb of ram and run the games off an SSD.

airdeano said:

on 2133 RAM 4250 with 8GB disk which is kinda quicker than my

RAID, SSD and abbacus. and JJ with his 2600 trident showed 7000 reads.

which does make me wonder if too fast can be a "bottleneck" for the other

support systems in the PC. or is this a non-issue?

airdeano

Click to expand...

The cpu still works faster than the ram can in most cases. The cpu certainly works faster than an SSD or HDD can fetch the stuff it needs so it does make a big impact on performance if you enjoy tinkering.

everyone has also missed one VERY IMPORTANT point:

what memory does your CPU/mobo combo support?

PLEASE check this, as your question may be of no use at all

EDIT:

your mobo supports.... 4 x DIMM, Max. 32GB, DDR3 2200(O.C.)/2133(O.C.)/1866(O.C.)/1600/1333 Hz Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory (from asus website)

so... your mobo does not natively support either.

and..... natively, the Intel® Core™ i7-2600K Processor supports DDR3-1066/1333 (from intel ark)

so... your cpu/mobo would need to increase the memory's ratio even further

Master&Puppet said:

The cpu still works faster than the ram can in most cases. The cpu certainly works faster than an SSD or HDD can fetch the stuff it needs so it does make a big impact on performance if you enjoy tinkering.

Click to expand...

All the cool kids have 32GB L3 cache

using 4 4gb 2133 muskin blackline and they work great with ivy. 1.5v xmp about 140ish us. lower voltage works better for keeping stress off the imc. looks great runs cool tons of fast mem super cheap.

with the current price for memory you really don't have to choose. You can have both lots of memory and super fast speeds.

TheOsTech said:

with the current price for memory you really don't have to choose. You can have both lots of memory and super fast speeds.

Click to expand...

If you can find a 4GB 2400Mhz stick for the same price or cheaper than a 2GB 1066Mhz stick then I will believe you (non-ECC DDR3).