Size or speed (again)

[improvised]

I've got about a $175 budget for memory on my new i7-3770k system. It's mostly a workstation where I use Photoshop and 3D Studio Max; of course, I want to do a good share of gaming though. My dilemma is this: Do I go for fast (say 2133 or 2400 @ 16gb) or more (1600 @ 32gb). I'd normally think its better to go for more, but it seems the Ivy Bridge does show some improvements with faster frequencies (at least with some games and pointless synthetic benchmarks). So if I'm mostly running Photoshop and 3DS Max, should I expect to better performance with the 32gb, or will the 16gb be fine? If the 16 is good, I'd obviously like to go faster and get those extra fps (that I'll probably never notice--but at least I'll "feel" faster).

I've been living with a 6 year old system with 4gb, so anything new is going to seem like a Ferrari to me.

 

[alvine]

go with more ram. if you would pick the fastest one you will see very small performance increase

 

[azathoth]

16GB will be enough for your usage, 32GB will see no advantage. The higher speed RAM will be better.

 

[alvine]

^ wrong. hes using photoshop. that application mainly uses your hard drive and ram to store temporary files so more ram is better

 

[improvised]

^ wrong. hes using photoshop. that application mainly uses your hard drive and ram to store temporary files so more ram is better

Alvine, I totally get what you're saying. But even if I'm working with, say, 10 x 100mb PSD files, and working with a 1gb model in 3DSM (which usually taxes about 50-75% of the ram of the physical file size), it seems like 16gb should be enough--even with other basic programs running. And I don't see myself ever working under that load but a few times a year.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'd just like to get a better understanding of how the extra 16gb will help in my situation.