Best 16gb of RAM for a Z97 Deluxe with a 4790K?

vibe666

vibe666

vibe666

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System specs are: Corsair Carbide 540 case, bequiet DP Pro 1200W PSU, i7 4790K, Corsair H105 cooler (w/quad SP120 fans), Z97 Deluxe mobo, 8gb RAM, 2x Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC, 250gb Samsung Evo SSD.

I've been upgrading piece by piece over the last few months and now I'm looking for (without breaking the bank too much) some new RAM to replace the generic 8gb kit from my old system.

The motherboard specs say the following:
Memory Support 4 x DIMM, max. 32GB, DDR3 3200(O.C.)* / 3100(O.C.)* / 3000(O.C.)* / 2933(O.C.)* / 2800(O.C.)* / 2666(O.C.)* / 2600(O.C.)* / 2400(O.C.)* / 2250(O.C.)* / 2200(O.C.)* / 2133(O.C.)* / 2000(O.C.)* / 1866(O.C.)* / 1600 / 1333MHz, non-ECC, un-buffered memory
Click to expand...

I don't mind paying a bit over the odds if it's going to make a significant difference, but I don't want to throw money down the drain if i'm not going to see any noticeable extra performance.

I'm not hugely into overclocking, but i wouldn't mind dipping my feet in the OC waters at some stage, but other than that I'd be looking at video editing and gaming mostly.

so is it worth pushing the boat out for some faster memory (and if so, whats the best balance of price/performance?) or is the 'extreme' ram just meant for the extreme overclockers? :)

I was also considering going the fully watercooled route somewhere down the line, so that *may* be a consideration in RAM choice?
 
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I've been trying to answer this question myself, since I'm also after a 16gb kit

For gaming, I don't think faster RAM helps (despite what Corsair keeps saying).

I have a TeamGroup 2x4gb 2400mhz kit at the moment, and running it on 1333 or 2400 made no difference to fps in the two games I tested myself (Sleeping Dogs and Arkham Origins).

Corsair puts some benchmarks saying that Battlefield 4 benefits from faster RAM:
http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/2013/october/battlefield-4-loves-high-speed-memory
and Starcraft
http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/2014/march/haswellrealworld
but there's some comments in other forums saying Corsair are intentionally using some buggy beta build for their tests of Battlefield 4.

There's some benchmarks from Anandtech from 2013 suggesting basically no difference with single 6950
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell/7
but some differences with some tri-fire setup (v. sceptical)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell/8

Linus tech tips suggests no difference in this video here:

My opinion is that the extra speed makes no difference, but it also doesn't cost anymore.
The cheapest 16gb kit is:
GeIL Black Dragon 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz at £119.99
and the "faster" kits are
GeIL EVO Leggera 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-14900C9 1866MHz at £119.99 or
GeIL EVO Potenza 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-14900C9 1866MHz also at £119.99 or
TeamGroup Vulcan RED 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-17100C11 2133MHz at £129.95

not exactly a lot of money between them
 
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For gaming and general use there will be no difference between 1600 & 2400 memory.

You only notice the difference in benchmarks really.

I have some G.SKill 2400 2x8GB sticks and they are fantastic however as I said, the only difference from previous memory is noticeable with benchmarks.
 
I noticed it in wow on a highly clocked i5, So much so i was able to blindtest the setting had reverted back to 1600mhz and upon hunting down why i was feeling lag i noticed the bios had reverted the ram speed. When i put it back to 2400mhz 1T Orgrimmar was a lot smoother. I reckon i must have been getting an extra 8fps or so easily. Now i wont go back below 2400mhz 1T and i reckon the Gskill C10 kit is the one to get.


I think i managed to get that one for £137, Cannot complain.
 
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Orgrimmar at peak time on Ivy is very cpu limited, Maybe 2 cores at most so the IMC really does make a difference to me and that was not even under Win 8 i was using 7 64bit. Im not suprised Batman or the others show no difference but for Wow i would squeeze as much as possible out of my ram. My 3D Mark testing also showed scaling all the way up.


When the i5 would not go past 4700mhz, The memory took over i almost cracked 10K physics without HT on 3DM11 on air which is pretty impressive.
 
I'm kinda looking for the sweet spot really and i seem to see a lot of people talking about timings being more important than actual raw speed, but that timings can sometimes be tightened on faster memory when clocked lower, so it seems to be a bit of a juggling act that you need to know a lot about to make the right choice.

from what I can see, 2400Mhz memory seems to make a decent jump in price over 2133Mhz (although not too big imho) but anything above 2400Mhz is ridiculously expensive, with some 2800Mhz RAM costing as much for 8gb as you could pay for a 16gb 2133Mhz kit.

anyone else remember the good old days when ram was ram and 1mb was a huge amount of memory? :(
 
okay, so I think I'm getting somewhere finally! :)

It seems like (with Haswell chipsets at least) 1600Mhz & lower is a no no as it *can* negatively affect performance in real world usage.

Another thing seems to have become evident, is that with multi-GPU configs, due to the extra GPU memory from having more than one GPU in the system, you need to consider how much RAM you have in the system overall as well, with the rule of thumb being 2x however much your GPU RAM total is, so in my case my two R9 290's have 8gb between them making 16gb almost a necessity to get the most benefit, although I guess that remains to be seen in reality. :)

here's my first choice at the moment: G.Skill TridentX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C10 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit

partly due to their popularity with high end system builders and fans of overclocking, but also in part due to this handy little review, which was very helpful. :)

First of all these run as std @ 10-12-12-31-2T which although may seem like bad timings are actually very good @ 2400MHz.

I have mine running @ 9-11-11-28-1T @ 2400MHz which as you can imagine is very fast indeed

They are very well built and can stand volts up to 1.775v (benching), i run mine @ 1.73 24/7.
Click to expand...

also the price isn't too bad when you consider the current price of RAM, although it's been cheaper (£115 in Feb 2013), prices are definitely coming back down again now after the Hynix fire in China.

Also, something i didn't realise is that with all other things being equal, 2x sticks of 8gb will perform better than 4x sticks of 4gb of the exact same memory, and that timings listed for memory are always for two stick as you might not be able to rech the same timings with four, so (unless you have a quad channel board) always go for two larger sticks rather than 4 smaller ones to make the same total as you will *generally* get better results.

i think. :)
 
stuie said:
Youve got a nice splash of orange with that saphire so id be tempted to get a couple of these

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-052-TG&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=2429
Click to expand...

haha, too late! :D

just ordered the g.skill sticks.

I'd originally planned on a nice blue theme in the case, as it's got a big window on it, but then the sapphire cards were at the right price/performance ratio when i was building, so that all went out the window! :(

I guess we'll see how it goes anyway, i've heaven and 3dmark and other bench tests from the initial config anyway, so i'll give them a go once the g.skill sticks are in and see what difference (if any) it's made.
 
I had those TeamGroup Vulcans and moved to the G.Skill

With DDR4 coming out, companies will be stopping DDR3 production so I reckon prices will start to rise a bit such as DDR2 has in the past when DDR3 was released.

I read that review vibe666, sadly mine won't do that. Even at 1.75v they don't tighten that much although I haven't really had a proper play with them.

This is my 24/7 setup

307vvon.png
 
JamesM said:
I had those TeamGroup Vulcans and moved to the G.Skill

With DDR4 coming out, companies will be stopping DDR3 production so I reckon prices will start to rise a bit such as DDR2 has in the past when DDR3 was released.

I read that review vibe666, sadly mine won't do that. Even at 1.75v they don't tighten that much although I haven't really had a proper play with them.

This is my 24/7 setup
Click to expand...
i'll be honest, chances are i'll never actually get around to OC'ing or setting up WC anyway (i have the best of intentions but very little free time for tinkering these days with 2 young kids :()

looking at your set up it's pretty much where I was planning on going with mine, not that different at all other than the slightly different mobo & cpu and the WC. :)
 
well I got the big monitor (the whole reasoning being going for two R9 290's in Crossfire), but it's not always easy to get get everything working with both crossfire AND the mahoosive 3440x1440 resolution! :D

bigscreen.jpg


the screen on the right is my old 24" 1080p BenQ looking decidedly small by comparison! :D

Far Cry 3 is fine with crossfire, but won't do wider than 16:9 even though it will cope with the vertical resolution fine, so I've got black bars either side. still looks sweet though on the monster screen and I'm still getting between 70-90fps most of the time on ultra. :)

My only real issue now is that for some reason, the cards seem to keep putting their DVI connections to sleep and not waking them up, so if the secondary screen times out if it's idle for too long, it won't wake up and all of a sudden i've no screen there at all, it's like it's been unplugged and sometimes even rebooting won't bring it back up. :(
 
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