low voltage ram vs regular

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extrafuzzyllama

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 29, 2010
Messages
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hi all i am buying ram and decided on GSkill Sniper 2x 4GB
i am buying from newegg but for $49 there are two models that seem the same except one says low voltage. both are same price and other specs seem identical.

my question is does it matter which i get?
if it helps i am using going to use a asus z68 maximus gene-z mobo with i5 2500k cpu
 
Since im not up on how touchy SB is with voltages on the ram i would recommend the regular.

if it was me, i'd get the low voltage, that way you can overclock it further, though that may be moot with an unlocked multiplier
 
lilfiend said:
Since im not up on how touchy SB is with voltages on the ram i would recommend the regular.

if it was me, i'd get the low voltage, that way you can overclock it further, though that may be moot with an unlocked multiplier
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I will go with regular ram then.
 
Hey, I just bought that kit...

I'm building a mATX layout where minimum juice is the goal. I want the lowest power req't I can get away with. Mine is an AMD, so there are differences.

I've been over at http://gskill.us/forum and their tech support jumps in. If you post a question there, I'm reasonably certain they'll set you up and tell you what kind of OC you can get.

Good luck.

Ken
 
AMD for lowest power requirement? That's fail. AMD chips regularly consume 25-50% more power for similar performance. RAM won't make much of a difference - like going from 3W to 2.5W per DIMM, which is minuscle.
 
AMD for lowest power requirement? That's fail. AMD chips regularly consume 25-50% more power for similar performance.
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Agreed. AMD was once the performance / watt leader however now they are not able to compete with that. This is a result of being 18+ months behind Intel in shrinking process nodes and also having (20% to 30%) lower per core IPC causing AMD to have to have more cores + higher frequency to try make up the difference.
 
SB CPUs like lower voltage, though even the regular is a safe 1.5v. So since the timings are the same, I'd go with low voltage which would give you more headroom for OCing. Then again if you're not going to be OCing the ram, it doesn't matter. Regular 1.5v is perfectly fine and stable.
 
Having overhead for overclocking is always nice, I personally went with the 1.25v myself.
 
manofthem said:
SB CPUs like lower voltage, though even the regular is a safe 1.5v. So since the timings are the same, I'd go with low voltage which would give you more headroom for OCing. Then again if you're not going to be OCing the ram, it doesn't matter. Regular 1.5v is perfectly fine and stable.
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is this true? I have 1.65 Voltage ram on my 2600k machine. if you check newegg rams they advertise that favored SB volatage is 1.65. I have 1.5 rams on my amd machine that I could switch out with if this is true
 
RAM power consumption is relatively low. The only people who need to worry about low-voltage sticks are server builders.

A single die of 2Gbit DDR3 1.5v 40nm consumes about 177 mW according to this document from Samsung. This means a modern stick of 4GB DRAM (16 modules of 2Gbit, 1.5v) consumes about 2.8w.

Add in the power reduction going from 1.5v to 1.35v and you get 2.3w per-stick.

So, you save 1W of power with 8GB of ram in your system. NOT worthwhile.
 
As I understand, low voltage RAM modules give you a little more overclocking potential and a little more room to tighten timings (rising the voltage without going out of system spec), it's not the power saving feature per se.
 
73110 said:
As I understand, low voltage RAM modules give you a little more overclocking potential and a little more room to tighten timings (rising the voltage without going out of system spec), it's not the power saving feature per se.
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bingo
 
^^ But, aside from that, what about the question of speed? Like I said, apparently low voltage is also marginally faster than higher-voltage-but-otherwise-same-speced RAM? That's what the review I linked above indicates... unless their methods are suspect.
 
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