RAM upgrade advice sought :)

Wolfdale75

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 17, 2010
Messages
133
Hi Guys,

I'm planning to upgrade to 32GB of RAM and am looking for your advice. My current RAM (8GB) is PC3-12800, but while I am in the process of investing, I am looking for something quite a lot faster. Here's my setup.

Intel Core i7-4770K (oc to 4.3GHz)
ASUS Z87-A
8GB Kingston DDR3 RAM (800.0 MHz (PC3-12800))
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
2 x SanDisk Ultra II SDSSDHII-480GB SSD
Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1

Could you recommend a sweet spot for high-performance and cost, in terms of going 32GB?

Is there a particular brand/kit you could recommend which is very fast but still affordable? Budget is about $400 / £265.

And, would it matter if that kit was *not* on my mobo's Qualified Vendor List for RAM?

Thanks for your thoughts! :)
 
1600 or 1866 mhz CAS 9 (aka 800 mhz/933 mhz). You don't need anything faster.

No, the QVL doesn't really matter.

Also, you should realize that your "investment" is not an investment, it's a dead-end upgrade. Your 32gb of RAM won't carry on to any platforms that are a real upgrade from your current one.
 
1600 or 1866 mhz CAS 9 (aka 800 mhz/933 mhz). You don't need anything faster.

No, the QVL doesn't really matter.

Also, you should realize that your "investment" is not an investment, it's a dead-end upgrade. Your 32gb of RAM won't carry on to any platforms that are a real upgrade from your current one.

I concur with Tsumi's assessment across the board. You won't be able to migrate the DDR3 any further than some one-off Skylake-S platforms (most likely those sorts of oddities you see from ASRock) and I have my doubts that you'll even be able to do that since the Skylake-S stuff is supposed to be capable of doing DDR3L which is 1.35v.
 
Thanks, guys.

So are you saying RAM speed doesn't matter? Why then all the ultra-high-performance expensive RAM on the market?

Is there a particular brand or kit you could recommend? Thanks!
 
Thanks, guys.

So are you saying RAM speed doesn't matter? Why then all the ultra-high-performance expensive RAM on the market?

Is there a particular brand or kit you could recommend? Thanks!

RAM speed matters (slightly) up to a point. I seem to recall reading for 1155/1150 platforms that the price/performance ratio basically stops being good past 2133MHz. However, you're really stretching the concept of "gains" imo when the differences are in the 1-3% area. That's why I stuck with 1600MHz DIMMs for my current build, even though I had 1866 modules prior. It didn't really seem to matter much.

Make/model wise I can only speak from anecdotal experience. I have 3 kits of the Crucial very low profile stuff in my sig (the 2x8GB kits) and have put the same kit into a couple builds for other folks and have yet to have any trouble.
 
Outside of useless synthetic benchmarks, you're not going to notice any tangible differences in real-world system performance between lower CAS (9-10) modules running at 1333, 1600, or 1866 (let alone anything clocked faster) on a recent Intel platform: SB, IB, and HWL unless you are doing some very memory intensive stuff.
 
I think if you want to make ram upgrade go for corsair but I think you didn't need 32 gb. I think you'd better buy new gpu if you want to upgrade for gaming.
 
Thanks, guys. It looks like there's no real performance advantage of going for 1866 RAM over 1600 for the extra price.

I think if you want to make ram upgrade go for corsair but I think you didn't need 32 gb. I think you'd better buy new gpu if you want to upgrade for gaming.

I want to *comfortably* be able to play "insane" map sizes on the upcoming GalCiv3. These are very memory intensive. Plus have several GB of other stuff running in the background of course.

What's wrong with my GPU? I only bought it a few months ago...how will getting a new GPU help my performance in GalCiv3?
 
you can see ~10% increase in cpu performance in games that are not gpu limited with faster ram
2133c9\2400c10 seems to be about the sweat spot since its within $5-30 of 1600c9 after that the price goes up a lot for minimal gain

i think you will find that 16g would be more than enough

there is very few games that wont be totally gpu bottlenecked on your system
im not sure what galciv3 needs but gtx770 is a re badged gtx680 which is a 3 year old gpu its still good enough to run most games at 1080p 60fps but there is cards out there that are more than twice as quick... for a price
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_Titan_X/29.html
by comparison the performance gains from 4 years of cpu evolution and higher ram speeds seem insignificant
but if you spend a lot of time in one of the few game that needs that little bit of extra cpu\ram performance then thats where you look if you can justify the cost
 
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Thanks, guys. It looks like there's no real performance advantage of going for 1866 RAM over 1600 for the extra price.

I want to *comfortably* be able to play "insane" map sizes on the upcoming GalCiv3. These are very memory intensive. Plus have several GB of other stuff running in the background of course.

What's wrong with my GPU? I only bought it a few months ago...how will getting a new GPU help my performance in GalCiv3?

  • Nope
  • You'd probably be fine with no more than 16GB based on what I see in this thread
  • Your GPU is fine. I think the statement about GPU upgrade was made without any context.
 
How frequently do you currently run out of ram with 8GB?

I don't play that game but I've yet to see anything push the limits of 16GB ram in my box. Hell I never see it up to 8GB of use 95% of the time or more.
 
I don't play that game but I've yet to see anything push the limits of 16GB ram in my box. Hell I never see it up to 8GB of use 95% of the time or more.

I've come very close to using 8GB of RAM on well-developed, "gigantic" maps. There are two larger map sizes than gigantic. But the dev team is working hard on reducing the memory requirements. This version of the game can have 8x larger maps than the previous version and up to 128 AI or human opponents, I believe.

But I've plumped for 16GB RAM now. Thanks for your advice guys.
 
I am going to build a gaming PC for my son I don't have idea how much of RAM will be enough. Is anybody there who tell me about gaming PC memory requirement.
 
yes 1600 with low timings (9 or less) is good enough but for a overclockable build faster ram is worthwhile so it depends a bit on the rest of your build
 
Is There any Laptop in your mind which has same price but have little more good features then 8GB of DDR31600.
 
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8g 1600 ram isnt really what you want to worry about with a laptop for gaming
you want 4 cores with a high clock speed and a faster gpu which will cost a hell of a lot more than a gaming pc with better spec
 
Thanks @dasa and @drescherjm. I have got the best suggestion from you both. I will go for 16 GB of DDR3 1600. :):)
 
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