WTF??? 4x1GB or 2x2GB!! plz advise

[4delta]

hi there guys, im buying my new rig soon and a new breed of RAM came on the market. i saw u can now buy 4GB of RAM(2x2GB) but they are xpensive - £212 for PC5400. i was going to buy 4x1GB PC6400 for £225 anyway, but i want to know if there is really that much a differance between PC6400 and PC5400?? if i can save £12 and 2 DIMM slots, the PC5400 RAM should be the right choice????? plz can u guys give me advise in this. im planning to immidiately OC my system which is going to consist of the following :

C2D E6600
P5B Delux WIFI/AP
4GB RAM (confusion mensioned above gives delays... )
8800GTX
XFI Xtreme Music
400GB hdd
Artic Freezer 7 Pro
VISTA Home Premium

your help is much apreciated !!

 

[fredgiblet]

It depends on how much you are planning on overclocking, if you are going for a mild OC then the 5400 should be perfectly fine, if you are going balls-to-the-wall then you may want to grab the 6400.

 

[sailer]

Part of this involves an answer that has yet to be given. With XP, the timings are better by going with two sticks of 1 gig ram instead of four sticks of 512 mb. It could well happen that two sticks of 2 gig ram will be faster than four sticks of 1 gig ram. As I say, Vista is too new yet for that answer to be known.

Other than that, as fredgiblet said, the best ram type depends on the overclock involved. Since you say you will be overclocking immediately, I'd go for the PC6400 ram, but I'd try to get it in a 2x2 gig set.

 

[4delta]

im going to OC my 2.4GHz E6600 to 3.0 GHz...or so i hope...i read on many reviews that the mobo im choosing is a really good OClocker. the 2x2GB PC6400 is round about £260 and that's well over my limit of £225..

 

[sailer]

im going to OC my 2.4GHz E6600 to 3.0 GHz...or so i hope...i read on many reviews that the mobo im choosing is a really good OClocker. the 2x2GB PC6400 is round about £260 and that's well over my limit of £225..

In that case, I'd try for the 2x1 gig set of PC6400, or if that's still over your budget, then I'd go for the 4x1 of PC6400 ram.

 

[Mondoman]

Since only roughly 3GB of your 4GB of RAM will be usable under either 32-bit Win XP or 32-bit Vista, you would need to go with 64-bit Vista to be able to access the full 4GB of RAM anyway.

 

[memorymaster]

As of right now, the 2x2GB memory (128x8 ICs) does not overclock as well as the 1GB sticks (64x8 ICs). If you are looking to overclock your ram very much at all, I would personally go with the 1GB sticks... But that is just my opinion...

 

[AdamBomb42]

4GB is a waist of money right now, buy 2x1GB of the fastest you can afford with low timings. I'm running vista and even when playing oblivion my memory only hits 60% load and super fetch doesn't do crap.

 

[yadge]

If you are only going to overclock to 3GHz, then PC5400 will be perfect.

The e6600 will be 333*9= 3 Ghz. So the RAM will be 333*2= 666.

So it should be perfect. You can save some money and have room to upgrade (although I doubt you will need to anytime soon)


But, as stated before, with a 32 bit OS, you can only use about three of the gigs anyway. So unless you are doing some kind of video or picture editing or something like that, it might be best to just go with 2gb of PC6400. Then you can save even more money and have more room for overclocking if you would like to.

I run vista and game on 1 gig, although oblivion does get a little choppy. So 2 gigs would be fine IMO.

I have that cpu cooler btw. It works very well. Nice build.

 

[sailer]

As of right now, the 2x2GB memory (128x8 ICs) does not overclock as well as the 1GB sticks (64x8 ICs). If you are looking to overclock your ram very much at all, I would personally go with the 1GB sticks... But that is just my opinion...

I hadn't heard of overclocking problems with the 2x2 gig sticks. If that is right, then the 1 gig sticks would certainly be best for the moment. Perhaps with time and maturity of the ram and motherboards, the 2 gig sticks will work better. That's the future though, and we have to work with what's available now.