Powerful gaming PC - what RAM?

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Billy Pilgrim

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Mar 6, 2014
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I'm about to order a PC build at a local PC shop. It's to run on triple screens, with an i74770K (or i54670K), and two GTX 780 GPUs. I might overclock the CPU a bit.

At the shop, they only seem to have a lot of Kingston RAM, and some Crucial Technology 12Gb kits. On the estimate (order proposal) they've put down: KINGSTON DDRAM3 - 8 Gb 1600 Mhz PC3-12800 - HYPERX RED (x2, making 16Gb RAM total, I'm not sure I need that much.)

I mentioned to the salesman that I may need faster than 1600 Mhz, but he dismissed my concerns.

What do I need to know about RAM? Should I get faster RAM? Will it make any difference? 16Gb or 8Gb?

I'd very much appreciate your knowledge and experience on this matter :) My budget is getting rather big, so I don't want to unnecessarily spend, but if it's worth it, I will (isn't that what anyone would say?)
;)
 
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1600 MHz are often more than plenty for gaming. Faster RAM would only be benificial if you were using an APU, as they also you your RAM as GPU memory, shared memory. Actually, the high speeds can make timings worse.

8 GB are enough for today's games, however as the games develope games begin to use more and more RAM. A few years ago everybody said that 4 GB of RAM was more than enough for years to come. The development in RAM usage in games has proven them wrong. 16 GB might be benificial in the near future. You can always start with 8 GB and then add more later on, if you desire.

Both Crucial and Kingston are some of the top competitors in the RAM market and they make reliable, value oriented and high performing RAM.

Linus shows...
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lostgamer_03

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Aug 4, 2012
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1600 MHz are often more than plenty for gaming. Faster RAM would only be benificial if you were using an APU, as they also you your RAM as GPU memory, shared memory. Actually, the high speeds can make timings worse.

8 GB are enough for today's games, however as the games develope games begin to use more and more RAM. A few years ago everybody said that 4 GB of RAM was more than enough for years to come. The development in RAM usage in games has proven them wrong. 16 GB might be benificial in the near future. You can always start with 8 GB and then add more later on, if you desire.

Both Crucial and Kingston are some of the top competitors in the RAM market and they make reliable, value oriented and high performing RAM.

Linus shows some benchmarks in the video below and explains why it's not needed with such high memory speeds. Take a look if you still feel as if you're in doubt. Link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWgzA2C61z4
 
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MagicPants

MagicPants

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Games rarely access more than 2 gigs of ram. However, considering the new consoles have 8 GB, I'd expect that to become the standard soon. Then maybe depending on how you configure your game, it might use more than 8 GB.

However even though the consoles have 8GB, their system reserves roughly 3GB, so we're really talking about 5.
So probably 95% of the games released during the next 4 years won't be able to use more than 8.

As for speed, intel has really good cache, so you're not going to be hitting the ram itself more than about 10% of the time (if that.) So you only realize 10% of ram speed in performance. Meaning the difference between 1600 and 1866 is negligible .

So I'd just go with 8 gigs of 1600, and upgrade later, if I need it.
 
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Outlander_04

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2 x4 gig , 1600 MHz , and rated for 1.5 volts or less

You do not need more than 8 gig total for gaming . So far games are 32 bit programs and cannot use more than about 3.4 gig

a very few games might respond to faster memory speed , but higher frequencies are not helpful in the vast majority of cases

The voltage is important . Using higher rated voltages voids the warranty on your processor
 
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