memory upgrade for gaming

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polonyc2

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I haven't bought new memory sticks in years as I've been satisfied with my 6GB of triple channel G.Skill memory but I notice I'm down to under 100 MB of 'free memory' when gaming with titles like the new Star Wars: Battlefront beta (according to Windows 7 'Resource Monitor')...is G.Skill still one of the top manufacturers or can someone recommend me some good memory sticks (I only want 3 sticks maximum so 3 x 4GB for a total of 12GB or even 3 x 3GB)...looking on Newegg I can't seem to find timings that match my current set (DDR3 1600 at 7-8-7-24)...do timings even matter?
 
G.Skill is still good. Though I wouldn't be afraid of Corsair, Crucial, etc. Timings do matter a bit, but it's not a huge impact. At DDR3-1600, I would just look for something <= Cas 9 and just make sure that your memory settings in the BIOS match the memory you are getting.

If you are adding sticks of memory to your current ones instead of replacing them, you would likely want to find something with similar timings and you'd need to run everything at the higher timings otherwise.
 
JS_ said:
G.Skill is still good. Though I wouldn't be afraid of Corsair, Crucial, etc. Timings do matter a bit, but it's not a huge impact. At DDR3-1600, I would just look for something <= Cas 9 and just make sure that your memory settings in the BIOS match the memory you are getting.

If you are adding sticks of memory to your current ones instead of replacing them, you would likely want to find something with similar timings and you'd need to run everything at the higher timings otherwise.
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I plan on just replacing my current memory with all new sticks as I don't want to mix/match...I'm leaning towards G.Skill Ripjaws because they seem to get great reviews and are fairly cheap
 
I personally wouldn't waste money on high end memory unless overclocking. Two things I would focus on next set of memory, such as reliability and matching speed of cpu fsb.
 
Nobified[H];1041910188 said:
I personally wouldn't waste money on high end memory unless overclocking. Two things I would focus on next set of memory, such as reliability and matching speed of cpu fsb.
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Matching of CPU FSB has been irrelevant since the start of the Core i series.
 
I just got 2x 4GB 1600 MHz G.skill ripjaws X off of newegg for 38.99 + free shipping. Not sure what country you are from but I know Crucial has a 2x 4gb Ballistix sport 1600 MHz for like 35.99 right now. In my opinion Crucial makes the best memory products on the Market. 50+ dollars for an 8gb kit is just not a deal in my opinion. But again, I'm not sure where you are from
 
installed my new 3 x 4GB (12GB total) G.Skill RipJaw memory but what I thought was going to be a simple upgrade turned out to be a major job...I ended up having to reformat my hard drive!...installed the new 12GB kit, turned on my computer and there was a black screen- no video signal at all...I could hear the system booting up but no video...turned the power off and tried it a 2nd time and the system posted but I got an 'overclocking failed' message during boot-up even though I'm not overclocking anything...gave me the option of resetting the BIOS back to default settings so I did that

even thought it involved changing my AHCI setting back to IDE which is not what I want...going back to AHCI involves some registry hack but before even considering that I was happy that Windows 7 booted up fine...everything was working...so went back into the BIOS to customize the settings that I had before...as soon as I changed the memory timings to XMP Profile #1 the system blue-screened with no way of fixing it

so in the end I had to do a complete reformat...everything is working perfectly now but what an annoying hassle just for a simple memory upgrade...doing some Google searching it seems ASUS mobos can be finnicky in terms of memory upgrades and lots of people get that 'overclocking failed' message...my mobo is a few years old so maybe that also was a factor...either way next time someone says you don't need to do a reformat when installing new memory it might not always be the case

** Memtest shows 0 errors after 8 hours so I don't think my memory is bad in any way
 
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** Memtest shows 0 errors after 8 hours so I don't think my memory is bad in any way
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I have seen it take 72 hours to find marginal ram on a few machines at work over the years. These machines crashed after boot but passed shorter memory tests. HCIMemtest (run with multiple simultaneous instances) or multithreaded memory tests may reduce the time to find the marginal ram.
 
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