Ram for gaming (Confused)

coughs · 26 Jul 2012 at 23:16

Hey,

I am looking for some ram for my Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe + 3570K and was wondering is 8GB enough or should I get 16GB for 1080p gaming? also what MHz should I get as apparently 2400 doesn't make any difference?

Thanks

wazza300 · 26 Jul 2012 at 23:50

i found 8gb to be enough,as for mhz 1600mhz upwards would be fine,i run 8gb samsung green @2133mhz,before that i ran corsair vengeance at 1600mhz and gaming was still fine

Blue160 · 27 Jul 2012 at 04:23

RAM speed makes very little difference to performance. 1600MHz will be absolutely fine. As far as capacity goes unless you do 3d rendering or lots of video encoding there's no point having 16GB. 8GB is way more than enough for gaming.

Orcvader · 27 Jul 2012 at 13:16

On average with gaming I see RAM usage of about 3.5gb. So 8gb is more than enough for gaming and some light video editing, 16gb is overkill.

As for RAM speed, for Sandy/Ivybridge, 1600mhz is the sweet spot, anything faster hardly makes a difference. RAM speed doesn't affect framerates anyway.

8 Pack · 27 Jul 2012 at 16:18

8gb, 2133mhz is the sweetspot with Ivy in terms of performance.

Orcvader · 27 Jul 2012 at 16:25

8 Pack said:
8gb, 2133mhz is the sweetspot with Ivy in terms of performance.

What? But you hardly gain any framerates at all with 2133mhz from 1600mhz! :confused:

Why waste money on faster RAM when you'll see/feel no difference?

Spenty · 27 Jul 2012 at 16:36

My ram is so fast it has turbo's on it. Seriously though I doubt you'd even see framerate difference between DDR2 800mhz and DDR3 2133mhz.

dfour · 1 Aug 2012 at 12:52

I had an issue with battlefield 3 and 8 gig of ram and kept getting the windows needs to sort its **** out as resourses are low which going to 16 gig cured. I didnt see usage over 5 gig with battlefield 3 before (with 8 gig) so I have no idea where the message was coming from.

8 gb should be enough except for badly coded games and software in windoze. 1600mhz is all you need anything else in E-peen. IMHO

Spenty · 3 Aug 2012 at 03:06

dfour said:
I had an issue with battlefield 3 and 8 gig of ram and kept getting the windows needs to sort its **** out as resourses are low which going to 16 gig cured. I didnt see usage over 5 gig with battlefield 3 before (with 8 gig) so I have no idea where the message was coming from.

8 gb should be enough except for badly coded games and software in windoze. 1600mhz is all you need anything else in E-peen. IMHO

Were you using a page file?

dfour · 4 Aug 2012 at 14:42

Spenty said:
Were you using a page file?

I may have had it turned off so there was my problem.

MagicBoy · 4 Aug 2012 at 14:49

Most games are Win32 applications therefore can't typically use more than 2GB of RAM. You may get some benefit from windows utilising additional RAM for background services and disk caching but you're not going to get a noticeable performance benefit from more than 8GB.

There will gradually be a move to 64-bit games as they push the envelope but it'll take a while especially as many titles are console ports. The PS3/360 get by on under 512MB RAM...

Randomface74 · 4 Aug 2012 at 14:51

1600 8GB is the correct answer