What speed for DDR4??

[Justinbaileyman]

Looking to buy some DDR4 but not sure what the standard speed is for the next gen?
Would DDR4 2400 15-15-15-35 be ok??
Its going in a x99 motherboard and then Zen Motherboard later on.
Also What size should I be getting?
Right now I have 32gb of G.skill DDR3 1600 and it seems like a waste to have so much memory right now as I have never gone over 20% usage yet..
Should I go 32gb again?

 

[lehtv]

For X99 I would buy at least 2666MHz, preferably 3000-3200MHz. No point in going with the slow kits when your chipset lets you run faster kits. Although, to be fair... it really doesn't matter much. It's just memory.

Should I go 32gb again?

No. Even with 2x8GB you'll be topping out at 40%... technically you could go 2x4GB and still be fine, there should be no difference in performance between 2x4GB at 80% usage or 2x8GB at 40% usage. Performance only drops if you use up all the RAM, forcing the OS to use a disk drive or an SSD as virtual memory. But 2x8GB doesn't cost much more so why not.

Its going in a x99 motherboard and then Zen Motherboard later on.

That's probably a downgrade.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

I wont be just hoping on the Zen band wagon until reviews are out first..

 

[Carfax83]

Looking to buy some DDR4 but not sure what the standard speed is for the next gen?
Would DDR4 2400 15-15-15-35 be ok??
Its going in a x99 motherboard and then Zen Motherboard later on.
Also What size should I be getting?
Right now I have 32gb of G.skill DDR3 1600 and it seems like a waste to have so much memory right now as I have never gone over 20% usage yet..
Should I go 32gb again?

I recently upgraded to the X99 platform myself, and grappled with the same question.

From my findings, I was able to conclude that DDR4 2666, preferably at least CL 15 or lower, is the sweet spot for Haswell-E.

Anything more, and it's very negligible since Haswell-E has a quad channel interface combined with a very large L3 cache which minimizes the impact of faster memory.. I currently have my RAM running at DDR4 2666 CL14, and everything is blisteringly fast.

As far as 16 vs 32GB, I would go with the latter. More and more games are using more RAM, and this will increase even more with future games becoming more intensive (DX12 seems to increase RAM usage) and being even larger than contemporary ones.

Also, next generation GPUs will have larger VRAM pools (big Pascal should have as much as 16GB), which rely on system memory as a buffer.. Usually you want your system RAM to be at the very least, twice the size of your GPU's VRAM..

 

[Soulkeeper]

this really depends on your budget
2400 to 2800 seem to be the sweet spot as carfax83 said, but if you went with 2133 to save a few bucks I don't think you'd be unhappy.
Keep in mind that these are all first gen ddr4 modules, you can always upgrade later when they mature.

 

[tweakboy]

2400

 

[biostud]

The only difference you will notice is in benchmarks. I went with 2133 because all other were crazy expensive at launch. Now I would probably choose 2400 or 2666 since the price difference is reslly small.

 

[PowerEngineer]

I have pretty much the same question, but am looking at a 6700K Skylake build on a GA-Z170X-UD5 TH motherboard.

I'm struggling to understand the trade-offs between higher rated speeds and lower rated voltages for a mild overclock. It seems that you really can't get both in the same modules. What are your thoughts?

I'm also scratching my head over the amount and arrangement of memory. Leaning toward 32 Gb now as a bit of "future proofing". Is more memory likely to affect the achievable overclock? Also wondering if two 16 Gb modules is better (or worse) that four 8 Gb modules.

Thanks!