new build memory question

[advanced]

im putting a new build based on an i7 socket 1155, is there a big difference between DDR 1333 and DDR 1600?

 

[Blain]

Oh my, yes

 

[fastman]

These old timers sometimes forget that not everyone is as versed as they are and get tired of the simple questions and that people are lazy to do simple research on their own.

So with that in mind, yes there is a difference. A 267MHz difference to be exact. With timings and CAS latency the same you will not see much of a difference in most cases but it depends really what you are using the system for?

Try reading this older article here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2792
Or this one: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2142409&highlight=ddr+1333+1600

Read, read and learn, and welcome aboard

 

[Concillian]

Really small, completely un-noticeable difference for the apps the average user uses.

You'll only see big differences in certain synthetic benchmarks and in applications that specifically demand memory bandwidth.

 

[Emulex]

yup. more ram will always paramount these days. seems everyone loves to open 20 tabs and 10 apps at once i'd take lower latency all day long. since i myself do not really overclock since I like my 20 tabs and 10 apps to never crash. zero crashes per year is my acceptable rate of failure.

 

[advanced]

im using it for gaming only, would i see any difference in performance if i used 2x4gb sticks as opposed to 2x2gb sticks?

 

[Concillian]

No.

Games, for the most part are still written 32 bit and only use 2GB for any given program.

4GB total is enough for a gaming machine to be as fast as it's going to be as long as you don't do a bunch of stuff in the background while you're gaming. Even Firefox with 20 tabs open isn't eating tons of memory. 8GB for a gaming only machine is spending extra money on "futureproofing" or for a different application that you know will exceed your 4GB (photo / video editing is the most common application for home users that will really eat the memory.)

If you're looking to save a few bucks, 2x2GB should be fine.

 

[Emulex]

actually 32bit is 4gb and with WOW32 they can use a bit more than win7 x86 (which defaults to /2gb not sure if you can even turn on /3gb mode).

/3gb was used in win2003 x86 to give 3GB RAM to app and 1GB to system. along with AWE you can rock 16GB of ram in 32 bit mode which is quite handy if you have licenses for old win2k3/sql server and you want to bump the speed up (YES both modes work in ESXi!). server licenses don't really get upgrades nor does sql server so you can understand the costs of maximizing old tech that you come into with your job. going from 1.8GB SQL process to 12GB with some system cache reserve or to run apps like log shipping - sweet.

not everyone can afford to buy new OS/CALS/SQLOS/SQLOS CALS every other year

someone actually hacked win7/vista and XP iirc to activate these features iirc reading. but with x64 each process in wow32 could get 4GB of ram in theory so that 12/16GB of ram really could go far if you could use it.

With the cheap price of DDR3 (Trust me its going UP soon) - buy a metric ton dude. I've got a stash of DDR3 sodimm/ecc rdimm/cheap(xms3) - the schtuff was expensive and i suspect with the japanese disaster and demand pricing will shoot up quick.

 

[Concillian]

actually 32bit is 4gb and with WOW32 they can use a bit more than win7 x86 (which defaults to /2gb not sure if you can even turn on /3gb mode).

32bit is 4gb if they play some programming games with the OS, yes. I know of no games that actually do that, do you?
Games use 2GB per right now.

/3gb was used in win2003 x86 to give 3GB RAM to app and 1GB to system. along with AWE you can rock 16GB of ram in 32 bit mode which is quite handy if you have licenses for old win2k3/sql server and you want to bump the speed up (YES both modes work in ESXi!). server licenses don't really get upgrades nor does sql server so you can understand the costs of maximizing old tech that you come into with your job. going from 1.8GB SQL process to 12GB with some system cache reserve or to run apps like log shipping - sweet.

Not sure what any of this has to do with "I'm using it for gaming only" the guy is not building a SQL database machine, he's building a gaming machine on a budget.

For what he's doing 8GB, even if cheap, is very likely throwing money away for a gaming system. Gaming systems typically see pretty short upgrade cycles, and on budget machines, $30-40 saved from memory put towards the video card can be pretty significant if you're looking at video cards in the $100-150 range, for example. $40 can mean close to double the GPU power in that price range.

 

[Emulex]

i'd never go back to 4gb x86 after having 8gb+ x64 .