Memory question: Which would you choose?

[X-ROG]

For the same money, which would you choose:

16GB (8GBx2) 1600MHz DDR3

or

8GB (4GBx2) 2400MHz DDR3

I'm just curious whether more people prefer outright speed or huge capacity.

[mx5boi]

I personally would go for more RAM rather than speed.

As a general rule, more ram is better than faster ram. Even slow ram is way faster than the swap file on a hard drive. If your applications have to swap to the hard drive due to lack of memory, your performance goes way down. So if you have a 64-bit OS, the extra ram could speed performance because the system would be less likely to 'Swap out'(to the hard drive).

[HiVizMan]

Not sure it is fair for me to answer.

But capacity has more value to me as a 24/7 user.
Speed has more value to me as a bencher.

Horses for courses.

[X-ROG]

This is interesting. On another forum I asked 5/6 went for speed! Will keep an eye on this 🙂

[xeromist]

I'm not sure I see a lot of value in either proposition. I've not had any 2400 memory myself but my understanding is that in real world usage there isn't much benefit over 1600, right? Likewise my gaming system runs just fine with 8GB. 16GB is a complete waste on gaming but on rare occasions I've edited very large images or HD video and appreciated having 12GB on my workstation.

I've read recently that SW:TOR runs better with certain files stored in a RAM cache so perhaps I'd consider more memory for that but that's a fairly specialized scenario.

[Retired]

1866 (4X4 gb)......

That was not ur question, but its my choice in general..

Easy OC to 2000 mhz..

Easy to tighten

Large capacity

1,5v

Great stability

somewhat cheap..

so my answer.. None of the one above..

[KILLER_K]

Synthetic benchmarking = 2,400mhz ram
General use= I still wouldn't get 16GB of ram.
* No one is going to use that much to begin with.
* perhaps make a virtual ram drive?

8GB @ 1600-1800mhz seems to be the sweet spot for most of the real world users. Thanks

[BeepBeep2]

Neither.
DDR3-2400 @ CL10 isn't worth much to me, that's like running 8GB DDR2-1200 but with CL6 or something IMO. Who really did anything like that? Besides, new Crucial 2x4GB kits can do 1600 7-7-7 or 1866-2000 8-8-8-24 1T.

2200-2400 CL6 to 8 or go home in my book for any kind of performance.

That means 2x2GB benching sticks (PSC or Elpida) and then whatever else for 24/7. I don't think people need more than 8GB for most things, I can even do photoshop with uber large images (50MP) and many layers on 4GB. If someone is adding 16GB for e-peen (without utilization), it is a horrible way to do so.

The user above me has a good idea with the ramdrive...in that case though, 64GB+ with 4+ sticks 😛

[YartsevSA]

Need to determine which timing you mean...