RAM capacity or speed?

[DIGITALI5]

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

[Jadarite]

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

[Matthias2437]

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

[DIGITALI5]

yeah gaming so i guess dominators it is then thanks

[Master&Puppet]

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.

[Rastalovich]

Originally Posted by Master&Puppet

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.

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.

[Master&Puppet]

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

[S_I_N]

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.

[Rastalovich]

Originally Posted by S_I_N

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.

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).

[SmoulderingCircuits]

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.