BD or SB to x79 later - DDR3, Go Big or Go Fast?

[Hauk]

I plan on building either a BD or SB rig now, and upgrading to X79 in March. So I'd like to get four sticks that I can (hopefully) use in quad channel later. Going 8GB DDR3 2000 is is close in price to 16GB DDR3 1600.

What to do!

2 kits of this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226219

or 2 kits of this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145334

 

[Elixer]

Get the fastest, RAM you can afford, you can't really go wrong, although, not all motherboards can use the fastest RAM out there, and some motherboards are really picky about the RAM it uses.

That means, you need to know what motherboard you are going to use, then look for the RAM.

 

[Meghan54]

As the recent Anandtech article on memory speeds and their effect/worth with SB, it showed the fastest RAM was nowhere worth the price being asked for it given it performed only a percent or so better than the slowest RAM speeds.

Go for size these days, not speed. With SB, the speed is pretty irrelevant.

As the article concluded:

I think we confirmed what we pretty much knew all along: Sandy Bridge's improved memory controller has all but eliminated the need for extreme memory bandwidth, at least for this architecture. It's only when you get down to DDR3-1333 that you see a minor performance penalty. The sweet spot appears to be at DDR3-1600, where you will see a minor performance increase over DDR3-1333 with only a slight increase in cost. The performance increase gained by going up to DDR3-1866 or DDR3-2133 isn't nearly as pronounced.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3/8

 

[Hauk]

Because I'm open in both the immediate upgrade and the next, mobo is an unknown. So far it looks like all three cpu configs take advantage of high speed DDR3, but if they'll actually benefit from it is an unknown. The last tricky thing is voltage. Many great options in both 1.5v and 1.65v. I wonder what BD and SB-E will be happier with.

Worth mention, I'll be running a couple Agility 3 60GB in Raid 0, no other drives.