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[Magathery]

Question for you boys & girls. With RAM, do you get what you pay for?

Here's the senario. With the impending reliese of Win7 I'm looking to max out my motherboard. So acording to the info that came with it, I've got 4 slots at 2 gig each. So a total of 8 gig. But this is looking a little pricy at the moment.



My first port of call was Crucial http://www.crucial.com/uk/

A 4 gig kit of two sticks from them for PC2-8500 DDR2-1066 CL7 is currently £75.89. Not bad all in all. However I wish I'd bought that back in July when it was only £59.79.



So I'm interested in what else is out there. A quick look through Dabs http://www.dabs.com threw out OCZ. In particulay this...

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/memory/ocz_ddr2_pc2_8500_gold_edition_4gb_dual_channel
PC2-8500 DDR2-1066 CL5

Now Dabs only want £54.34 for this, but they recon it will be over 4 weeks before they have any more in stock. I don't think I'm that paitent.



Then there's Scan. They have some Corsair TwinX DDR2 XMS2, PC2-8500 (1066), CAS 5-6-6-18 for £66.29
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-(2x2GB)-Corsair-TwinX-DDR2-XMS2-PC2-8500-(1066)-240-Pin-Non-ECC-Unbuffered-CAS-5-6-6-18-EPP



eBuyer had one or two to choose from.

They had some Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066MHz/PC2-8500 HyperX T1 Memory Kit CL5 2.2V for £63.80
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/159196

Interestingly thay also had the same OZC kit that Dabs were advertising, but they had it in stock and for £64.99
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149202



But what else it out there? I'm fairly resigned to the idear of aproching Crucial again. I've brought RAM off them before, the delivery is quick and their returns process is also good. But if I can get just as good for less, well that's no realy a competition is it? 8 gig from crucial is going to set me back £151.72. 8 gig of Kingston will put me back £127.60. Thats £24.12 saving.

I'm just curios as to whether there are other options.

Also is there any difference in performance between CL5 and CL7?

[Junta]

Check for compatibility Rip.

I have an MSI motherboard, and it (and older MSI boards) have refused to run memory that needs "overclocking".

Make no mistake, most standard boards regard DDR2 1066MHz/PC2-8500 speed ram as "overclocking" - often requiring you to adjust voltage and memory timings in the BIOS. This comment applies even though the manuals state that the motherboards support such speeds (with a caveat).

I had OCZ and then later Kingston ram. My MSI P45 just can't do the business with it, and prior to that, my older MSI board couldn't either.

The Kingston stuff is no thrills and works for me a treat. I got a bargain ages ago from OCUK - 8gb for £65.... still using it now even though I have it clocked down to PC2-6400 (800Mhz).

[Zarf]

PC6400 is fine if you're not doing serious overclocking.  grab yourself two of these kits - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-014-OK&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=813

Timings could be better, but that's 8GB for £80. It's not worth spending the extra to get faster RAM, you'll never notice any difference.

[Magathery]

Excellent! So choosing 800mhz over 1066mhz would be a sensible move? Considering that I won't be overclocking my system.

The one thing I have always liked about Crucial's WEB site is the ability to tell them what mother board you have, and for them to genrate a list of compatable bits.

[Junta]

Agree on the 8gb making a big difference. Don't bother with 1066 stuff if you're not overclocking. There is a difference in overall system speed but not really noticeable as Zarf says (I agree).

The big change for me was having 8gb as opposed to 4gb - a nice step up in performance for 64 bit Vista.

As for compatibility - use Crucial to identify the type of ram you need, then buy elsewhere if needed. Basic thing is that most boards will support 800 stuff as it is a standard, as long as your motherboard has 240pin slot ram and you add it in pairs you'll be fine. Remember that for dual channel ram you need to put the memory in the right slots (if adding two modules and not four). If adding four modules make sure its all the same stuff - don't mix an match in the same channel (modern boards colour code the memory slots so you can see which ones are pairs).

On my MSI board - channel 1 is the two orange memory slots and channel 2 is the two green memory slots. Add the same memory modules to the same coloured slots.

CL5 and CL7 are timings of the ram. Shouldn't bother you unless you're an enthusiast tbh, the faster modules can give better performance. If you but 1066 ram and clock it at 800 you can sometimes get away with running it faster in the BIOS - Chaos could advise you if needed. For me though, this activity isn't worth it as my MSI board isn't great at running ram as it should (why is this a problem with MSI.. second board I've had that one run ram at stated speeds - and plenty of online reports with people stating the same thing... only a problem on the socket 775 boards mind as the memory controller isn't integrated with the CPU like on the AMD chips and the Intel i5 and i7 cores).

[egg]

Would add something really techincal an informative but Junta and Zarf have covered all you need to know pretty well.

PS Junta how much better is the performance of 8GB over 4GB?  Also with 8GB you can pretty much turn off your page file to ensure all memory utulised is on your mem modules rather than disk

[Zarf]

PS Junta how much better is the performance of 8GB over 4GB?  Also with 8GB you can pretty much turn off your page file to ensure all memory utulised is on your mem modules rather than disk

You can, but you're playing with fire a bit here. Some games (ARMA2) are very touchy about how much page file you have, even when you have more than enough RAM.
I've also had a situation where my comp would blue-screen on boot after using a boot tracing app for optimisation purposes, even in safe mode - that was caused by disabling my page file. Managed to fix it by remotely mounting the registry hive and editing the page file back in though.

[Junta]

PS Junta how much better is the performance of 8GB over 4GB?  Also with 8GB you can pretty much turn off your page file to ensure all memory utulised is on your mem modules rather than disk

Very big hike in performance for me, faster load times and more responsive. Very pleased.

I'd keep the page file on personally, the O/S may not need it but it was core to the design so I'd keep it on personally My hard drive never churns these days anyway.

[egg]

PS Junta how much better is the performance of 8GB over 4GB?  Also with 8GB you can pretty much turn off your page file to ensure all memory utulised is on your mem modules rather than disk

Very big hike in performance for me, faster load times and more responsive. Very pleased.

I'd keep the page file on personally, the O/S may not need it but it was core to the design so I'd keep it on personally My hard drive never churns these days anyway.

Cool I might look at that when I rebuild to Win7 properly

True but paging has always been to increase total addressable memory and nothing more. If you increase RAM it only aids performance as you can page less (RAM faster than HDD obviously )
Give it a try

(x86 users with 4GB RAM should definately turn off page file)

On another note
I remember setting up RAMDisks, and installing games directly to RAM, (copying to HDD and then scripting to copy it back to the RAMdisk on bootup).
Games took seconds to load lol

[Chaos]

more ram = Big difference
Faster ram = Did I actually put the ram in?

[claws]

Would leave page file on personally - there's no advantage from disabling it with lots of RAM, and plenty of possible downsides (some programs temporarily ask for crazy amounts of memory, games among them). I feel like I'm agreeing with John again

[Chaos]

PS Junta how much better is the performance of 8GB over 4GB?  Also with 8GB you can pretty much turn off your page file to ensure all memory utulised is on your mem modules rather than disk

Very big hike in performance for me, faster load times and more responsive. Very pleased.

I'd keep the page file on personally, the O/S may not need it but it was core to the design so I'd keep it on personally My hard drive never churns these days anyway.

is that how you feel? personally?

[egg]

Would leave page file on personally - there's no advantage from disabling it with lots of RAM, and plenty of possible downsides (some programs temporarily ask for crazy amounts of memory, games among them). I feel like I'm agreeing with John again

Be more specific on crazy ammounts of RAM. The maximum addressable memory in x86 is 4GB.  The most any application can ask for is  2GB.... Its an OS limit   Unless you use the 3GB switch which obviously allows up to 3GB.

If you have 4GB of physical RAM, Windows cannot address any more than that.  This also has to include any cache on hardware such as CPU, DVD drives, HDD and also memory on your GPU.  This is why on x86 with 4GB RAM you only see 3.x GB as it has to address other memory too.

x64 is different as it has a lot higher limits, but still most (all???) games are x86 native so have to work in the boundaries of 2GB.... I have NEVER seen a requirement for any home based application to require the 3GB switch.

So as I said earlier x86 with 4GB turn off page file, x64 leave it on, BUT with 8GB RAM like Junta I'd be tempted to turn it off to see how it played out

[claws]

Well that's 2GB of addressable RAM per-process, so if you're like me and you like to run 10 programs at once, you can eat a lot of memory pretty quickly!

My point is that once you start getting 4GB+ of RAM, you're probably not paging due to lack of memory. Windows will still page things out, and I'm sure there's specific circumstances where you'll gain a teeny bit of performance from disabling paging with high RAM. But in general, I don't think there's much to be won and there are certain applications which need a pagefile, so I'd be wary of offering that up as general advice.

I feel the people with enough memory don't need to disable it and the ones without definitely shouldn't, if you see what I mean

[discordance]

From personal experience the 2 Gb limit is a lie. I've hit a wall at 1.5 Gb on some of my memory munching projects. I'm pretty sure what windows does is divide the address spaces in half so on a gaming rig with a 1 Gb of VRAM it splits the available 3 Gb of system RAM down the middle. That or I somehow had 500 Mb of background processes but I killed everything but the system in process explorer. Could have done with an 8 Gb setup for that project .