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I am in the process of buying components for my PC and am curious what is a recommended balance between speed and amount when it comes to RAM. For example if I was throwing a few extra bucks into the purchase should I upgrade 8 gigs from DD3 1600 to 1866 OR should I buy 12-16 gigs of DD3 1600?

Thanks for any advice!

My guess is that over 8GB, you'll notice speed more so than quantity unless you're doing something that is a huge memory hog like high resolution photo editing or CAD design. That said, I'm guessing you won't notice much of a difference going from 1600 to 1866. 1-3% increase in speed is not verifiable or usually noticeable. Its sometimes even considered within the margin of error in benchmarks.

Amount is far more important than speed. You, and the apps you run, will notice zero difference between 1600 and 1866 MHz memory. Go for the 12-16 gigs.

Buy 4 GiB DIMMs rather than lower-density 2 GiB DIMMs. Thus, 2x 4 GiB = 8 GiB or 4x 4 GiB = 16 GiB would be reasonable amounts of memory to purchase for a Sandy Bridge system.

There's not much of a real-world performance difference between PC3-10600, PC3-12800, PC3-15000 or PC3-17000 (DDR3-"1333", "1600", "1866" or "2133", respectively). There is a real-world effect on your wallet, since they are priced at $50, $64, $72¼ or $100 per 8 GiB, respectively.

There's no harm in using faster memory. If you want to spend the extra $22¼ per 8 GiB for e-peen bragging rights, that's okay.

You'll probably find this article very convenient then. Good timing for you.

As for capacity vs. speed, it will depend on what you're doing with your system. Super-fast RAM won't help you at all if all your memory is used up and the system has to trash to disk. Conversely, if you're tasks only use up a small amount of memory, but it's heavily using that amount, higher-bandwidth/lower latency memory will show a higher performance impact.

if u choose to go with more capacity it will be good. I've read some articles about sandy bridge and memory scaling. a 1333mhz ram with cl7 is enough for almost whatever u can do. If u want more performance, oc the cpu.

More Ram is never enough. Go for it...

luisnhamue wrote:

:wink: if u choose to go with more capacity it will be good. I've read some articles about sandy bridge and memory scaling. a 1333mhz ram with cl7 is enough for almost whatever u can do. If u want more performance, oc the cpu.

You might have read Anandtech's latest Memory Scaling Review.

yeah, and you might have done that too. Techreport just posted some news about DDR3 price dropping,
given that ram speed is no longer a hindrance to CPU oc'ing, its time to go for more ram amount.
Im about to build my rig, and by the time I'll start (August end), I will go for 16BG.