RAM. How much better is it really?

Give this guy an award, he's explaining in details how it works !! like he said, only warranty, heatspreaders/colours and customer service really differs from brand to brand (if you compare same timing/speed ram)

Basically, if you go for a no name company, maybe you have the same chips as Kingston HyperX ones but you don't have the lifetime warranty and the timing/speed that are way optimised by Kingston and tested to work flawlessly with any rig (that stands for any other manufacturer too)

True although a lot more goes into it then just what was mentioned, The IC manufacturers make the ICs (memory chips) to specific standards and just like CPUs they can differ from chip to chip. Then the actual stick manufacturers buy them in bulk...Once they get them , the fun begins... The ICs are first tested to meet the stick makers standards anre binned accordingly, out of a single lot purchased the ICs may be binned for manufacturing into lots for say 1600, 1866 and maybe 2133 freqs....Once that's done they are further binned to meet standards to run at different CLs, like 1866 with a CL of 8 or a CL of 10.....then the different bins are paired up to similarly tested PCBs and even down to the solder used.....Once the sticks are made and the SPD flashed, then individual sticks are tested with others to ensure they will work together with no problems....With the tolerances as tight as they are, out of any given 20 sticks from a production run they may be only able to to get 2 4stick sets out of the 20 total, leaving the other 12 sticks to be tested to make 3 or 2 stick sets, it's much easier to match up 2 single sticks that for 3, 4, 6 or 8 - and it gets tougher as the freqs get higher, which is why the very high freq sets of say 32GB are so expensive.....and what people don't understand is that this is all done for a reason, to offer sets of sticks that will work together.....you see all these people in the forums telling others to just add sticks to what they already have, or buy 2 sets of 2 sticks of the same DRAM to save $10 rather than buy a single set of 4 sticks...and quite often the two sets won't play nice (which often can be managed by DRAM voltage or MC voltage adjustments or timings changes, but then you aren't getting optimal performance....

Lower end (priced) DRAM often hasn't gone through a very extensive binning or testing operations and to that end don't perform as well, or in some cases come out as requiring higher voltages (i.e. 1600/CL9 sticks shouldn't require any more than 1.5 volts, that's the base JEDEC standard), which is why I urge people to stay away from 1866 and below freq sticks that have a voltage of 1.65 and are at an entry of CL9......Also good sticks to look for generally always have some OC headroom, this is why I generally always go with GSkill DRAM, that I from working their forums and getting to know the folks in Taipei (their marketing, tech guys, Field engineers and design engineers, I have a pretty good idea of what they do and how....am also pretty familiar with the ins and outs of some of the other manufacturers