Stick with 12gb or go for 24gb?

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rjolin01

[H]ard|Gawd
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I currently have 12gb of DDR3 1600 OCZ RAM in 6x2gb setup. I was thinking of upgrading to 24gb in any of the mix setups possible. (i.e. 6x4gb, 2set 3x4gb, 3set 2x4gb) My questions are as follows though...
1) Is it worth upgrading to 24gb as 12gb seems good enough atm but there are some good holiday deals going on.
2) If I do upgrade to 24gb but downgrade to DDR3 1333 will it make it worth the upgrade?
3) How will this all affect my oc'ing?
4) Any other information you have would be appreciated.
 
1) Is it worth upgrading to 24gb as 12gb seems good enough atm but there are some good holiday deals going on.
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Depends on if you actually more than 12 GB of ram. How often do you use swap on your 12GB system now. I would expect that adding an additional 12GB would not help gaming at all if that is what you will be using this for. It may help video processing and it will help with VMs. It can help hard disk speed by increasing your read cache.

2) If I do upgrade to 24gb but downgrade to DDR3 1333 will it make it worth the upgrade?
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Maybe.

3) How will this all affect my oc'ing?
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It is harder on the cpus ram controller to run with all slots filled and run them above the speed they were designed to run at. That is 1066 MHz for socket 1366. Adjusting voltages and timings can fix this however your mileage will vary.
 
Well also comes down to is it worth it to you ... Is it going to make everything faster ... yes and no ... but with 12gb ram you should be good for alittel while why not get your self a very nice set of SSD and raid 0 that crap and really boost you system... just my .02$ and then in a few checks get another set of 12gb ram :)
 
Yeah I second the raided SSD or a RevoDrive instead of 24GB ram. I run 12GB as well and barely get near 10GB when runing a bunch of VMs.
 
Unless you are trying to virtualize 5 or 6 different guests on your machine, I'd say no, your 12gb is more than enough and you should put that money elsehwere.
 
i use after effects
24gb is a good amount
4 cores = 4 gb each + 8 for the os
or at 8 threads = 2.5 gb each and 4 for others
yeah you'll use it
 
Considering how cheap ram is these days.. you can't really go wrong. If you sell your old sticks, it'll be an even cheaper upgrade!
 
If you decide to go with additional ram you could probably sell that ram later in a year or so for more then you payed now, something to think about.
 
For those who suggested I get ssd and raid0...look at my sig...I know they are only 64gb kingstons but thats plenty for running the programs and games i gots. besides that it seems its split down the middle if i should or not. maybe i will throw my ram on here and see how much i get. then decide.
 
rjolin01, what applications do you run? I have 24GB, but I also use After Effects and Premiere Pro for video work. Even for that, I think it is overkill. I do want to see what impact trading 8-12GB of it for a scratch RAMdisk would do to workflow :)
 
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Under normal use, 12G is more than enough for gaming and VMs. That said, if you add a 10G (or so) RAM drive and deal with a volatile mount point, you can really get some ridiculous IO. An extra 12G is ~$150 these days, which I did after the initial 12 and some SSDs on my workstation. 1333 RAM is still much faster than my RAID 0 G2s. If you are running stock speeds, 1600 vs 1333 does not matter.

Lord knows RAM seems to migrate from box to box. I regret now not having picked up some extra DDR2 when it was cheap. Got some older 775 mainboards/CPUs that would find a good home, were RAM as cheap as the DDR3 stuff.

A final thought - nothing stopping you from going 3x4G + 3x2G = 18G.
 
Add 2 more of those 64gb SSDs to your RAID array and it would be that much faster. 24gb is overkill I think...,
 
be prepared to increase imc voltage and have a hotter running cpu. You might have to drop down your overclock.
 
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