New Memory suggestions? (ASUS M5A97 R2.0, FX-9370)

Insane NiTEmare

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Apr 25, 2014
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My current rig is as follows
-AMD FX-9370 OC ~4.916GHz with all 8 Cores enabled (FSB is 200)
-ASUS M5A97 R2.0
-ASUS R9 270X DirectCU (2GB model)
-Antec "650w High Current Gamer" (620w output total)
-Kingston 2x4GB DDR3 1600 [KHX1600C9D3K2\8GX] (reboots system at abnormal clocks or clocks higher than 1600 so I don't touch FSB; even 1599 breaks it)
-Corsair H80
-AE2500
-HP wireless keyboard/mouse kit
-SyncMaster 941BW (1440x900 75Hz EDID max) input range changed to cap at 2560x1440 60Hz using CRU (monitor is weird and won't scale 16:10 to 16:10 but will scale 16:9 to 16:10, all 16:10 resolutions over 1440x900 have a 90% chance to have black bars beside it and scaled to 16:9)

Since my motherboard and CPU accept DDR3 1866 I was thinking of buying a new 2x4GB kit (or more) because I plan on building another rig for someone I know and he doesn't care about speed or size because he isn't a power user. I'm currently running things like Photoshop with images at 4K an 8K with commonly 10+ layers and I'm seeing the RAM cap out way to fast when doing so compared to my older 2K images. While I understand mixing DIMMs isn't recommended I will most likely be swapping the 1600 DIMMs by June (or buying something like a 4x4GB kit in June instead). I live in Canada and would rather not hunt for RAM to find that it doesn't work (either at it's potential or at all), and ASUS's qualified vendor list didn't help too much either because some of the RAM is discontinued (or doesn't ship here) when I searched for it; and while that's only guaranteed to work it isn't "One Size Fits All" and there are others that aren't on the list that do.

Curently I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate (x86_64) but I'm backing up my main drive right now to re install Windows 7 Ultimate and then add a dual boot Windows 8.1 because my DirectX is causing serious issues with rapid BSOD (reset OC, didn't help).

Programs I use (not in any order, only most common)
-Garry's Mod (SP modelling, not server use. ~36GB of addons load)
-Photoshop CS6 (again; 4K and 8K images at 16bit; huge files)
-Programs open at (almost) all times;
-Chat/game clients (Skype, Steam, Origin, Overwolf)
-VPN (Team Viewer, Hamachi)
-iTunes
-Sync clients (Dropbox, Google Drive)
-Ares
-Open Broadcast Software (Streams tend to be 1-2 hours long, Faster/fast encoding, broadcast at 1600x900)
-Fallout: New Vegas (moderately modded, but not as far as it could be)
-Burnout Paradise w/Vanity 2 Beta 10
-VLC
 

Insane NiTEmare

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Apr 25, 2014
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That's what I thought, but what I still haven't gotten over DDR3's minimal Latency VS Speed difference; they nearly cancel each other out and I can't decide whether I should pay the premium of either because I'm not using an APU so there is no immediate speed issue.
 

Tradesman1

Legenda in Aeternum
The real advantage of 1866 over say 1600 is the bandwidth, where 1600 theoretically can process up to 12,800 MT/s (mega transfers per second (roughly equal to megabytes) the 1866 can do almost 15,000, so more data is able to run through the pipe at once with the higher freq sticks, it's not a ton, maybe 2-4 FPS gming wise, but shows more when multi-tasking or working with more memory intensive apps like video, imaging, VMs, CAD, etc
 

Insane NiTEmare

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I might wait until June to buy a full 4x4GB kit then, while the lags in Photoshop that I get even with smaller images are a pain, I'd rather have a fully compatible setup that works without question in larger images. FPS don't matter to me too much though because I had to increase the resolution using CRU to prevent overshooting FPS vs refresh rate in some of my games by 10:1 without using Vsync.