Appropriate memory or overkill?

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SS580

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Jul 4, 2013
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Hi All,

I'm an old dog with an opportunity to learn new tricks. So, I'm building a new pc and I'd like to learn about hypervisors... ok, plus a little gaming.

I already have an i7-3770 (not the 'K').

I am looking at purchasing this memory:G.SKILL Trident X Series 32GB 1600
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231629)


And this motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H.

Is the memory overkill? I will not be overclocking, but I will be putting a heavy demand on the memory. But, since I'm not overclocking, do I still gain an advantage because of the incredibly low CAS on this memory?

Or, can I save myself a fair amount of $$$ and get a CAS10-11 and still get the same performance?

Thanks... sort of new with this.
 
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eoinycroiny

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its been awhile since iv build a computer so im not up to scratch on the latest available hardware but i think i get what your trying to do and if i was building it, this is what id be thinking and looking to figure out:

it all really boils down to how many virtual machines you intend to have on this system and how much resources you think each of your virtual machines will need.
what do you plan to run on each of them? 32g is a lot of memory and its pretty fast but you do have a lot of processing power to go with it so.......its not really a question anyone can answer except you.

you'll also need to consider bottlenecks in the hdd arrays, and south bridge and networking port/s. for example, if you have several virtual machines running simultaneously all trying to use a single network card........its going to shit a brick and cry.

it will only be as fast as its slowest component, plus once a bottle neck is jammed, it kills all performance to a near halt.

i'd suggest multiple disk arrays, one for each virtual machine would be ideal or at least 1 physical hdd for each virtual machine. raid 0 is great for extra read/write performance and its what i use for my gaming rig but if a drive dies everything is lost and can not in any way be recovered, ever. so read up on different raid configurations if your not familiar. you could also possibly use a pci raid card to offload some of the work from your south-bridge which handles data flow from the disks. theirs a whole variety of ways you could go about it, research is the way forward.

sorry i didnt exactly answer your question but like i said, its really up to you if you think its enough RAM or not. i just hope my 2 cent can help you in the right direction and get you on the right track. best of luck with your adventure and id love to hear how it goes

EoinyCroiny
 
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SS580

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EC,

Thats a lot of food for thought - and I see that to do this properly, my costs are going to go out of budget rather rapidly. (LOL. Small budget). I'll look at buying maybe 3 2 TB HDDs and see how that does me.

I was considering installing Win 7 (64x) as my base OS, making it a Type 2 Hypervisor... then adding Win Server, Web Server, TFS Server and SQL Server with the MSDN licenses that I have through my company.

Could still use some feeback on the CAS 8 vs CAS 10-11 option. Seems 8 would be sweet, but if its an issue of where you have to overclock to get the benefits of CAS 8... then there's no need.

Thanks again, EC.
 
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Y0GI

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Jul 22, 2013
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Here is an article on memory usage which tests various timings and frequencies: http:// The bottom line is that lower CAS latency is of marginal value and increasing frequency above 1600 MHZ also yields relatively little benefit.

Save yourself some money and relax the latency a bit.

Good luck!

Yogi

 
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SS580

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Yogi, EC:

Thanks very much for your answers! Yogi, you hit the nail on the head with that article - it provided 'perspective' that I haven't been able to find heretofor. EC, you gave some incredibly valuable food for thought. Very much appreciated!

Best,

Steve
 
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Y0GI

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Jul 22, 2013
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You're quite welcome, Steve! Glad that I could help.

Yogi

 
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SS580

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Hey All:

A partial update for you. I went ahead and ordered 32 gb of RAM - 2400 Mhz at CAS 11. I decided if a little is good, more is better. Since the graph showed such a little difference between the CAS ratings, but a considerable difference between the speeds, I went high on that direction. We'll find out if it was worth it... or if I blew a few $$ unnecessarily.

One interesting thing - the 2400 MHz memory (G.SKILL F3-2400C11Q-32GAB) cost me $261 ($289 on newegg, but used a 10% coupon discount)... that was much, much cheaper than MOST 32 gb kits at 1600 MHz on Amazon.
 
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Tradesman1

Tradesman1

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Think you'll love it, especially if you multitask, use memory intensive apps etc (imaging, video, VMs, CAD, etc) you will see a vastt difference in freqs and CL - the articlle referenced above is just one of many, that simply loves at reads and writes , where there will be no major differences, it when the DRAM get's used in the real world and is doing multiple things that high freq/low CL shines
 
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