any memory genius here

musicmonky

I have 8GB of memory running at 6-6-6-18 (see attached pic)
is it worth my while moving to 4GB of

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-TWIN2X4096-6400C5-PC2-6400-DDRII-SDRAM-Memory/dp/B000TPXULC/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1256811509&sr=8-7

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-800Mz-HyperX-DDR2-Memory/dp/B000NX0XOC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1256814887&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/OCZ-PC2-6400-800MHz-Unbuffered-Platinum/dp/B000VY8O6M/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1256814887&sr=8-5

youcancallmeal

It really depends. What are you doing with your PC or what do you plan to do e.g. overclocking, gaming, video editing etc

If your not doing anything out of the ordinary then changing to any of kits you have listed may result in a slight performance boost as the timings are tighter. Doesnt seem worth the hassle to be honest

Solitaire

Utterly not worth it. €80+ to drop from CL6 to CL5 and halve your memory in the process?! :eek:

Anti

A bit more voltage to your ram, and drop the timings to 5.5.5.15/16 shouldn;t be out of the realms of possibility.

lmimmfn

completely not worth it, the only real time you need faster clock speed ram is if youre overclocking and you cant unlink the memory from the FSB overclock, the memory can limit your overclock.

And as was said you can achieve faster timed ram settings by just increasing the rams voltage.

Dublin_Gunner

Most certainly not worth it in the slightest.

Ram timings are overrated, and you'll only ever notice the minute difference when benchmarking your RAM.

As the Core ix series and AMD's chips have integrated memory controllers, (i.e. no need for the memory access via a northbridge) the CPU has direct access to the memory, so access times and bandwidth have even less of an impact.

With RAM, what I'll always state is, more RAM >>>>>> faster ram.

Accessing RAM is ALWAYS faster than accessing a HDD, so more of it the better.

musicmonky

many many thanks to
youcancallme>al , Solitaire , Anti , lmimmfn and Dublin_Gunner

I play games a bit CSS, TF2 and GRID . But I do alot of browsing and media playing.

Just being anal and wanting an excuse to upgrade the memory.
What I have is very plain generic memory that works ok, but not super fast.


I'll use the money to upgrade the processor probably in the new year.

musicmonky

Anti wrote: »

A bit more voltage to your ram, and drop the timings to 5.5.5.15/16 shouldn;t be out of the realms of possibility.

seems the memory only goes to 1.9v . I have it at 1.8v at the moment.

not much room for maneuverer.

Solitaire

Stuff that goes at 1066MHz with those CL5 timings go at 2.1V. A hike to 1.9V is about as much as I'd risk on non-certified designs (heatspreaders or no) but it can give you just that little bit of leverage... only way you can find out how low you can push the latencies is good ol' Trial And Error

Solitaire

Solitaire wrote: »

Stuff that goes at 1066MHz with those CL5 timings go at 2.1V. A hike to 1.9V is about as much as I'd risk on non-certified designs (heatspreaders or no) but it can give you just that little bit of leverage... only way you can find out how low you can push the latencies is good ol' Trial And Error

Dont spend too much time on it as lower timings=tiny performance gains.

lmimmfn

musicmonky wrote: »

seems the memory only goes to 1.9v . I have it at 1.8v at the moment.

not much room for maneuverer.

you'll gain next to 0 in performance( excluding synthetic benchies like SiSoft Sandra's mem benchmark, games will get 0 increase ) even with much much faster ram, whatever is gained could be doubled by a few 100mhz overclock on the cpu.

Dublin_Gunner

lmimmfn wrote: »

whatever is gained could be doubled by a few 100mhz overclock on the cpu.

or less! A defrag would probably give you a better performance benefit these days.

Back in the old days of DDR, ram could have a fairly decent effect, on both Intel & AMD platforms. But not now, ram is so fast now anyway compared to DDR, that any benefit is really lost within the power of the total system.

And I'd also like to state that I'd never chose a RAM overclock over a CPU overclock - if you had to clock back your CPU to get your RAM clocked a bit higher, just don't do it. Get as much out of the CPU, then see where the RAM will go - the performance you gain will far outweigh the RAM overclock.

musicmonky

Guys (and maybe Gals).
I think you have answered my question fully.
Boards is the great oracle.

Cheers