Real world difference between the cheapest and the dearest...

DanTheMan · 23 Jun 2007 at 20:51

Looking to upgrade from my lowly 1gb to a decent 2gb set. Always wondered, what REAL WORLD performance would you see say between;

OcUK 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Kit: ~£75

and say;

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-8888C4 TwinX (2x1GB): ~410

?

If both were overclocked to their max stable o/c, what real world performance difference are you looking at, mainly in gaming?

lay-z-boy · 23 Jun 2007 at 22:32

Depending on the game i would say at most, 2-6fps

The corsair stuff is stupidly overpriced for what it is.

pieman109 · 24 Jun 2007 at 08:54

Go with cheaper/midrange memory. Unless you wanna run benchies all day and get that final 10 points in a particular benching utility, its not worth it imho, for the extra cost involved.
I'm also convinced that a lot ppl expect huge gains in performance when spending ridiculous amounts of dosh on memory, when in reality they're hardly going to notice any improvements. Far better off spending the money on a faster cpu or vidcard, you probably will see a tangible improvement.

Cob · 24 Jun 2007 at 13:34

The OcUK PC8500 kit is pretty damn good. I'm running mine at 1040mhz 5-5-5-15 at only 2.1v.

I've had it upto ~1170mhz at 2.2v. It's only just 1mb Super-Pi stable at that speed tho.

HangTime · 24 Jun 2007 at 15:49

This is one of my bugbears.

Spending extra one posh RAM is one of the least cost-effective ways of increasing gaming performance. Far and away the most important component is the gfx card, followed by the cpu.

Or in other words, spending say an extra £70 on the gfx card will affect gaming performance drastically more than spending an extra £70 on the RAM (assuming same size modules of course).

As an example a couple of weeks back I upgraded from an A64/DDR setup to a C2D/DDR2 rig. For the memory I got 2gig of Corsair XMS2 6400C4 for £44. Now this memory is nothing special HOWEVER I could have spent twice as much and not got much real-world gain in gaming.

In years gone by this wasn't necessarily the case because sometimes cpu overclock would be limited by memory speed - but nowadays pretty much all chipsets have dividers available, so even with cheap memory you can still overclock cpu pretty much to the limit.

Obviously depending on what you use your PC for there is a case for having fast memory at the expense of gfx/cpu, but remember the OP is looking at this from a gaming perspective

simonnance · 24 Jun 2007 at 17:49

£335 diff... you could get a near-top range CPU or GFX for that.

That much for ram.... insane! Worse than £200-250 for Mobos.