790i Ultras are not fun to find RAM for

[Restroom]

I've had a new rig sitting in pieces for a week and a half now waiting for EPP2 memory to materialize on the market. If I want to dance to the EPP2 tune with a 790i Ultra, Nvidia tells me, I'd better not want to exceed 2048MB with DDR3-2000 or -1800. Fine, fine, I'll run 1600MHz, should be easier to find anyway. Now who can I get some from? Refer back to the link; I get precisely three partner-certified products to choose from:

• Corsair's tighter-timinged XMS3 DHX fare (bottom of table), which the site's useless PriceGrabber-powered finder claims doesn't exist, and of which no retailer I could locate has a mention. I emailed their General Inquiry folks two weeks ago inquiring about availability and have heard nothing back.

• Some Kingston HyperX which their DDR3 product page doesn't acknowledge exists, but for which I found a mention and datasheet (warning, direct PDF link) for, emblazoned with a scary "Preliminary" watermark. Suffice it to say there's no one on earth who has any of this to sell, either.

• An offering from Aeneon which simply doesn't inspire any confidence in the product, also claiming to support both XMP and EPP2 while not claiming that doing so improves the 9-9-9-27 timings and further claims to do it at only 1.6V.

Now, I don't want to get into how dumb an idea I think this sort of cross-manufacturer pat-on-the-back 'certification' business is, or even the fact that I won't technically be running true SLI with a single 9800GX2 (at this point). I just want to get some damn memory so I can get the machine built. I would prefer to jack in 4GB of the PC3-2000 offerings from Corsair or OCZ, cost be damned, but not only are those similarly impossible to find, despite having been listed as extant products from both since a couple days after the 790i Ultra launch, now I have Nvidia telling me to do so would be a bad idea. I need to config (now that I'll have the OS to address) the full kitty and if I'm RAM-intensive to begin with I'd like not to have a bottleneck in the worst place componentwise; this is an overkill system into which I need to build as much headroom without serious overclocking as possible, not a yearly gaming rig.

So why am I telling you all this in a public forum, what am I asking? I need to know where to turn now. Ideally, someone could illustrate (preferably on an EVGA 132-CK-NF79-A1) how Nvidia's full of shit and I can run 4GB of this, that, or the other without any issues at all; if that's not going to work, then maybe someone could point me in the right direction as to where to get a hold of this certified crap. I'm going to place calls to Corsair and Kingston tomorrow morning, but I don't get the impression they're going to give me anything useful. I'd buy it right out of the warehouse if they'd let me, I'm going nuts trying to get this all in line and I can't just sit on my laurels waiting for the products if I don't know how long I'm going to be waiting.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

 

[myocardia]

DDR3 has been available for quite awhile now, even in 2GB sticks. BTW, welcome to anandtech.

 

[surfsatwerk]

Any DDR3 from a reputable company should work. It just may not exactly run at the timings advertised and you may have to tinker a bit to get it to run stable.

 

[Owls]

The OP's post is the primary reason why I haven't jumped into DDR3. $400 for 4gb is absurd and that is the LOW END. The corsair is over $700. /boggle

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Owls
The OP's post is the primary reason why I haven't jumped into DDR3. $400 for 4gb is absurd and that is the LOW END. The corsair is over $700. /boggle

Yes.

Also don't fall into the trap of EPP2 like people did with EPP with DDR2. It's marketing. Just get any quality memory you want and set the timings manually.

 

[Restroom]

I appreciate the info and the welcome (though I've been around the site about five years, I lost my forums info), but it's the "may not ... run stable" in surfsatwerk's reply that most concerns me, not that I'm having to shell out for top-binned chips. I want those components, I'm trying to build a system with as many of them as possible, and I was hoping, given explicit motherboard support for ddr3-2000 out of the box, that I could lay hands on 4GB of something made of those Micron -125F-binned chips, but the design won't allow 2x2GB at that speed. Besides, while I'm not so worried about my wallet as the build, $1200 worth of memory is stupid. That extra memory bandwidth and convenient auto-OC and SPD settings has to be traded for the availability of twice the capacity, and I'm not scared to push the clocks on that board at all in the unforeseeable event I saw a reason to to to reclaim that bandwidth.

The thing I'm wondering about now is how much of a difference having certified/SPP2 DDR3-1600 modules is going to make, since I can't find any. I'm assuming no one reading this has any either, let alone a config where they have a set of each, so it's probably a moot point, but I figure it's worth asking.

Any other info or recommendations would be appreciated, of course, but I think it's time to go with my gut about certification and dismiss it so I can get this rig built and have something other than this poor tablet PC I've been raking over the coals for six months.

 

[surfsatwerk]

Maybe I wasn't clear. My memory is completely stable, but you can't expect it to do that right out of the box. I had to enter in my timings manually. Also with the current bios the 790i only supports 2000mhz in the 3 and 4 memory slots, not in all four memory slots.

Also SPP2 is utter nonsense, buy the sticks that you want.