2133Mhz ram for gaming?

[Jbonham_86]

Hello all, Im building a pc for games but I am huge noob, I have doubts about what kind of ram to get. In the website I have chosen I can see 2133 Ram very affordable and with not much difference in price (if any) comparing them with their 1600mhz counterparts, so I thought to get 2133mhz, but there has been friends that have told me that the best spot for games is 1600mhz, and 2133 could even hurt the performance of the pc, and that I should go for 1600 with low latencies instead of 2133.

What do you think? I have chosen a R9 290 4gb as a graphics card and a i5 4670 as a procesor.

 

[razel]

You won't gain very much, however if the price isn't much, it won't hurt either provided that the 2133 RAM is reputable and has an easy warranty. The only thing to watch that could hurt you is the latency. A high latency 2133 RAM could be slower overall than a low latency 1600 RAM. MHZ is like your maximum speed. You rarely hit max speed with data all the time.

Check anandtech's memory reviews. I think in the past 6 months they did a bandwidth/latency test across several speeds and produced a VERY useful chart of bandwidth (mhz) and latency.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

For gaming? Zero, zip, nada difference. We're talking about nanoseconds.

 

[Blain]

Hello all, Im building a pc for games but I am huge noob, I have doubts about what kind of ram to get.

What do you think?

If I were shopping for high quality memory, I would use the following parameters as a guide...

* DDR3 rated at 1.5v or lower
* DDR3 rated at the lowest CAS I could afford
* DDR3 rated at the highest clock speed I could afford
* Limit the scope of my purchease to G.Skill, Mushkin, Samsung, Corsair XMS or Crucial (non-Ballistix)

While not wavering on the voltage point, I would balance the other issues with my budget.

Remember, my goal is not pure "benchmarking" performance, but simply finding the highest quality memory I can afford. ^_^

The only reason I pay a premium for low latency, high speed, low voltage memory is...
Quality and quality alone.

1.5v is the JEDEC DDR3 voltage standard.
Stay with 1.5v or less if you can afford it..

What he said

 

[Cerb]

2133 at high voltage will be pointless, without using IGP, and it's usually those kits that are not much more than 1600 kits. With a video card, it's not worth worrying about. Haswell finally got to where 1600MHz can make potentially tangible differences in some programs (aside from WinRAR ) v. 1333, and 1866 might not be a bad choice if the price is basically the same, but even then, the differences are very small, in line with differences in performance seen between different motherboards (which are so small nobody really cares, except that it's interesting they aren't truly identical).

 

[nenforcer]

Intel's memory controllers don't officially support faster than DDR3 1600 and AMD newest APU only support DDR3-1866 I believe so you would need to overclock to achieve the DDR3 2133 speeds.

It looks like you have the non-K i5 4670 (multiplier locked) which prevents overclocking the chip so don't even bother.

 

[Morbus]

Intel's memory controllers are also known to be overstressed by RAM with more than 1.5V. I bought my RAM based on that most of all, basically went for the fastest 1.5V. Because I could.

That said, Intel CPUs and motherboards WILL work just fine with RAM faster than 1600MHZ. You do need to go into the BIOS to tell it to work at those speeds, but high-speed RAM usually has profiles you'll want to enable anyway, so it's not really "overclock", it's just proper setup.

 

[Jbonham_86]

G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 1600 PC3-12800 8GB 2x4GB CL7
( 7-8-8-24, Voltage: 1.5 Volts)

or

G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 2133 PC3-17000 8GB 2x4GB CL9
(9-11-11-31 , Voltage:1.60~1.65 Volts)

The price is the same, which ram would you recommend me for high gaming?

 

[lehtv]

The DDR3-2133 kit wins here, high frequency makes more of a difference than low latency. 74€ for that kit is a great price as well since the cheapest kit of at least 1600Mhz I could find on pccomponentes.com was 68€.

 

[lehtv]

Intel's memory controllers are also known to be overstressed by RAM with more than 1.5V. I bought my RAM based on that most of all, basically went for the fastest 1.5V. Because I could.

That was true for Sandy Bridge and may have been true for Ivy Bridge, but it's not true any more for Haswell. 1.65V RAM is fine for Haswell.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1698560/65v-ram-haswell.html#10941292
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7507562&postcount=4

 

[Jbonham_86]

Thanks for your answer!