DDR3: Size vs Speed

kristmace

kristmace

kristmace

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With DDR3 prices being so cheap I'm thinking about upgrading to 8GB from 4GB. My PC is mainly used for gaming, but I do the ocassional bit of content creation stuff.

My current RAM is 4GB G.Skill Ripjaw which runs at 2100Mhz. Would 8GB of normal 1600mhz RAM actually perform worse because it's slower?
 
In applications which do not need more than 4GB performance would be worse as the Ripjaws will underclock themselves - but most likely the difference wouldn't be discernible anyway. Obviously with applications that do use more than what you have currently, there'd be a massive boost as it won't have to use the pagefile.
 
you wouldnt notice the performance loss going down in memory speed say maybe a second or so in some bench marks at worst but you'll notice the diffrence when running heavy ram programs as when you ram is limited the system crawls to a hault so i would say go for it :)
 
More like mili seconds probably. The only purpose of "fast" ram is to handle higher FSB speeds. This is no longer an issue with sandy bridge so "fast" ram is now pointless pretty much for intel cpu's.
 
It is unlikely you'll notice any difference between the two ram speeds in real life without benchmarking (at least in my experience) however, as above you will notice if you run out of ram. I fitted 8gb to my most recent pc for some of the stuff i do.
 
Its all about multitasking and what you multitask. i.e. watching a movie on a second monitor while running a minimized virtual machine on another, while photoshop is open, a web browser is open, word is open, a game is minimised... you get the idea.

I'm one of those people who hates to close and open applications when I'm using them constantly, and typically system uptime of a week/two at a time, I can't be bothered to load up apps! from reboot :-).

If your memory fills up, the OS dumps the stuff that's minimized/unused onto the hard disk. here is the bottleneck, your Hard Disk! to maximise, OS need to free up RAM (again ...) needs to dump what it has loaded and load memory for what you maximise and set focus to.

This is slow. So most apps use 4GB ram, there just is no need for more unless your rending massive print work on illustrator or running memory intensive applications like matlab or mathematica, or your a heavy multitasker.

edit: oh and more relevant, I would opt for larger memory sticks if I'm planning to upgrade, would hate to throw stuff away ... not because it would be faster ...
 
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8gb (2x4gb) is minimum I now use in new builds along with W7 64 for friends.

As already mentioned DDR3 is cheap, so fill those DIMM slots.
Using 8gb myself, pc seems more responsive, it seems only photoshop uses the full amount.
 
I went from 8GB to 16GB but I also do large photo edits at a time, and there's a big difference, however going from 4GB to 8GB was bigger in change than from 8GB to 16GB also in pure daily use for a responsive system. I'd defintely recommend 8GB - and size over speed (well not under 1333mhz at least).
 
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