RAM prices and upgrade cycles

[Dannar26]

Having built a devil's canyon build a year ago, I can see RAM prices have fallen. What I paid for 8 gigs of 1866 will now literally buy 16 gigs.

What do you guys think? With 16 gig kits on newegg for 69.99, is now the time to upgrade? When will production stop on DDR3, and how will that effect prices?

Also, I don't understand why there's so much RAM rated higher than 1600 in terms of speed. Aren't all the consumer level processors only rated for 1600? I bought my 1866 kits because they were on sale...but is there any real advantage to me using them with an i5 4690k?

I've read that dual channel is faster than quad channel...so for speed's sake, would 16 gigs @ 1600 in dual channel be the best fit? I kind of want to go to 32 gigs while it's cheap.

Is it in anyway bad to be using a faster kit (1866 and above)? Or put another way, is it more min-max to match the speed directly to the cpu, and then only use dual channel?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Are you, practically speaking, going to see any benefit from 32GB before the next time you do a full platform upgrade and have to use DDR4 anyways?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Are you, practically speaking, going to see any benefit from 32GB before the next time you do a full platform upgrade and have to use DDR4 anyways?

I'm debating the same thing, sort of. DDR3 is getting really cheap now, and it wouldn't hurt to max out my boxes, if I really wanted to, for the "long haul", if I were to keep my Haswell G3258 rigs for another 5-6-7-8 years, or maybe longer.

Then again, Skylake is here (well, almost, for the locked variants), and DDR4 is nearly mainstream already as far as prices. Not quite as low as DDR3, but getting there. ($70 for 16GB DDR3, $96 for 16GB DDR4.)

There is the "Rowhammer vulnerability" to worry about too, with massive arrays of DRAM. DDR4 specs somewhat mitigate the issue, so an upgrade there might be a good thing.

 

[Dannar26]

Are you, practically speaking, going to see any benefit from 32GB before the next time you do a full platform upgrade and have to use DDR4 anyways?

I tend to hang on to my stuff for a pretty long while. I had a core 2 quad (2.4 ghz base speed) machine that I built in '09 that still lives on as my brother's gaming rig. Still using the original gtx 260 I built it with to boot. I imagine with a gpu upgrade, I could still use it.

Presently, the answer is probably not. But will 32 gigs be the standard in 5 years? Right now the relative low prices make me think it's a bet worth taking.

After all, once DDR 3 stops being manufactured, won't the prices creep back up?

It's probably at least worth going from 8 gigs to 16 in dual channel, right?

 

[MongGrel]

I still just use 12 GB of GSKILL Ripjaws DDR3 1333, they overclock pretty nice. Actually bought those at oe time just for OCing the XEONs, have 1600 on another rig I took out.

But actually the new DDR4 does look pretty reasonable for most things, not sure you really need the fast stuff over capacity.

But why I come here, to find out about things like that

 

[Dannar26]

So capacity aside, what's the min-max choice for overall best speeds?

I have an i5 4690k with an ASrockZ97 Extreme 4 board. I am led to believe that this only supports RAM frequencies of 1600 in DDR 3. Is it possible to get RAM with a higher frequency, and run it as such...like over clocking? Or am I hard wired into 1600 no matter what?

And if I cannot run RAM at any frequency other than 1600...should I get a 16gb matched pair (since I have a dual channel mobo) at the lowest CAS latency I can find at 1600? Or would a higher frequency be better or the same at identical CAS latencies?

 

[MrTeal]

Is there anything you do with your computer that requires such a large amount of RAM? For the vast majority of users, 8GB is enough right now and likely for the foreseeable future. 16GB gives you a little more room if you have a lot of high use programs open or do a lot of video editing, Matlab manipulation of huge datasets, etc.
Unless you're doing something that really requires 32GB I wouldn't bother, and you'd know it already if that were the case since you'd be crashing into the limit at 8GB.

Your current RAM will probably default to 1600, but check in the BIOS and enable XMP if it's not already. That will run the RAM at its rated speed.

Dual channel vs quad channel refers to the number of memory controllers in use. Putting four DIMMs into a Z97 board won't make it quad channel, you need to move to X99 for that. There's some downside to running four DIMMs vs two especially if you're trying to really push the RAM, but the effect for you is debatable. If you're just running your RAM at the stock 1866 speeds and you really want more RAM, I'd just grab another 8GB of DDR3-1866 for $40 and be done with it. The rest of your platform will probably need replacing long before 16GB becomes a bottleneck.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZRG05PW/?tag=pcpapi-20

 

[spacejamz]

So capacity aside, what's the min-max choice for overall best speeds?

I have an i5 4690k with an ASrockZ97 Extreme 4 board. I am led to believe that this only supports RAM frequencies of 1600 in DDR 3. Is it possible to get RAM with a higher frequency, and run it as such...like over clocking? Or am I hard wired into 1600 no matter what?

And if I cannot run RAM at any frequency other than 1600...should I get a 16gb matched pair (since I have a dual channel mobo) at the lowest CAS latency I can find at 1600? Or would a higher frequency be better or the same at identical CAS latencies?

I just upgraded to 32GB of DDR3 Gskill 2133 Mhz (I bought 2 kits of 16GB for $70 each) for my i7 4790k running on an Asrock Z97 Extreme 6 board...loaded the XMP profile and running with no issues...

Before upgrading, I had 16GB Gkill 1600 mhz and then I bought 16GB of Patriot 1866 memory and they were running together at the 1600 speeds. I returned the patriot memory and got the kits from Newegg. I put the 1600 sticks in my second rig that only had two 4GB of 1600 Ballistic sticks in it...


I went with the 2133 memory as it 1.5V...the Gskill 2400 memory was 1.65V. I am running everything stock and did not want to mess with the memory voltage...

 

[spacejamz]

I have an i5 4690k with an ASrockZ97 Extreme 4 board. I am led to believe that this only supports RAM frequencies of 1600 in DDR 3. Is it possible to get RAM with a higher frequency, and run it as such...like over clocking? Or am I hard wired into 1600 no matter what?

your board supports memory up to 3200...

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z97 Extreme4/?cat=Specifications

- Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L Memory Technology
- 4 x DDR3/DDR3L DIMM Slots
- Supports DDR3/DDR3L 3200+(OC)/2933(OC)/2800(OC)/2400(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1600/1333/1066 non-ECC, un-buffered memory
- Max. capacity of system memory: 32GB*
- Supports Intel® Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) 1.3 / 1.2
- 15μ Gold Contact in DIMM Slots

 

[kitatech]

I've jumped to a 24mp Nikon D610 this past year and 8gb of RAM was just barely satisfactory for Adobe PS to handle the larger files....so I've bumped to 16gb this week....should give me another year or two on this 1st gen i7 PC

 

[JimmiG]

I'm debating the same thing, sort of. DDR3 is getting really cheap now, and it wouldn't hurt to max out my boxes, if I really wanted to, for the "long haul", if I were to keep my Haswell G3258 rigs for another 5-6-7-8 years, or maybe longer.

Then again, Skylake is here (well, almost, for the locked variants), and DDR4 is nearly mainstream already as far as prices. Not quite as low as DDR3, but getting there. ($70 for 16GB DDR3, $96 for 16GB DDR4.)

There is the "Rowhammer vulnerability" to worry about too, with massive arrays of DRAM. DDR4 specs somewhat mitigate the issue, so an upgrade there might be a good thing.

Yeah, same here. I might keep my Haswell system for several more years. However if the CPU begins to degrade or fails, I would probably rebuild the system with Skylake+new mobo+DDR4 anyway, rather than investing in another Haswell/Devil's Canyon CPU. In that case investing in more DDR3 RAM would have been a waste of money.