Hard time choosing ram

[Brizors]

I've been doing a lot of research and I'm at a stalemate. I'm finding equal distribution of people saying timing is more important, bandwidth is more important and lastly people blindly recommending things because it "worked for them" and then the thread dies.
I found this but it doesn't help because we don't know the timings.. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-benchmark-core-i7-3770k,3181-10.html


Then I found this... http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/ivy-bridge-ddr3_4.html#sect0
So there IS a performance upgrade going higher than 1600 ram and quite considerably.

My specs are i5-3570k, Giga Z77X-UD3H and my application is 1080 gaming with lots of video rendering with file sizes up to 50+ GB and many times I am rendering and gaming at the same time.

Which ram should I go with? I'm looking for someone who can explain why with IVY bridge in mind and for my applications. I've heard rumors lower timings are better for games and higher bandwidth is better for rendering. I don't know if that's true although, and for that matter by how much and why. I do consider an extra 2 frames significant just for perspective.

 

[ilikemoneygreen]

Im not really sure what you need explained further then what you linked. That link provides so good info....Far more info and actual evidence then people here are going to provide. Lol, thats a lot of effort to put forth in a thread.

Your board maxes out at an OC'd RAM of DDR3 2800 according to the manual. It supports these without OC 1600/1333/1066. If you want to OC your ram go for it. The higher the better but you start to lose reliability. To be honest though, 1600 is fast. 2800 is awesome, but its really not noticeably faster. You might be able to tell, but i highly doubt it. I think its about what your usage is. Gaming at 1080 is not really a good excuse to bump up the ram. If you want your games to be faster then you should look into upgrading your GPU and making that K processor overclock scream like none other. Making sure that the OS and your most used programs are on a decent SSD would also increase the speed tremendously on just about everything. Way more then RAM ever can.

Im a bit confused by your specs to your usage though. You do lots of video rendering? What do you mean by video rendering? encoding videos converting them and whatnot? If that's the case, the CPU is the real speed killer in that department. with ram your really not saving a lot of time. You convert a video for 10min and it is instantly done after the conversion... the ram is not the hold out. 2666 ram will make it like 9min and 59 seconds(it wouldn't even be a whole second that's shaved off). You want it to be quicker then upgrade the i5 to an i7 and it will convert it in 5min.
As for you working with big files like 50+GB, if you have an HDD anywhere in this system then it wouldn't be smart whatsoever to have the increase in RAM speed because it still has to wait for the slow HDD to write to the disk. Also with that, if your system is on SSDs then the gain in increased clocks on the RAM would benefit a whole bunch of small file read and writes more then it would a couple big file read and writes. Meaning if you had like 5000 500kb documents being loaded into RAM it would finish the task much faster with 2666 RAM because it actually spends alot of time being loaded into memory. The same 2.5 gb in one file would be done just as fast with 1600 RAM.

(Try it with an icon on your desktop, make new folder, click and drag an icon in, copy that icon and paste it 20 times then ctrl-a, then ctrl-c and hit ctrl-v 10 more times. ctrl-a and ctrl-c again with ctrl-v multiple time. repeat until you get like 5000 files of the 2kb icons. I bet it will be like 8mb. find a random file thats like 10mb and copy and paste it just to see how long it would take. then copy and paste your folder with 5000 icons. it will be longer. )<--this is where having high clocked RAM would really benefit you... not a couple huge videos an hour. If you have enough of it, RAM isnt really a bottle neck computers. SSDs are even way slower then RAM.
Im not saying faster RAM is bad, the future hold really fast memory, but i am saying your focused on the wrong upgrades. If you need RAM then just buy good 1600 and save your money for something that you will actually see a benefit from. You start to OC memory its going to be good for a little while then poop out quicker then it should pending how much you OC for little gain. Or you buy the more expensive special already OCd RAM that will still give you little gain and you'll be down on more money when you could have been putting that where it counts.
Hope this helps you, i spent a good 10 min on this.

 

[Brizors]

Yeah this helps a ton, thank you!

Woah.. so if I buy anything higher than 1600 ram my mobo wont recognize or let it operate at that speed? Holy crap I didn't know that.. So if I want to see anything more than 1600 I would need to buy 1600 rated ram and OC them?

By video rendering I mean taking raw game data recorded from fraps, editing and then, well.. rendering it. I see your point, I really should have an i7 if I want to see time cut back on renders in that regard.

Great example, I totally see how ram makes a difference now, and how it won't really effect gaming so much.

What I'm understanding is it would be worthwhile to get at least 1600 ram and either leave it stock or OC if I really wanted to.

FFIW, I currently have http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231321

 

[ilikemoneygreen]

Yeah this helps a ton, thank you!

Woah.. so if I buy anything higher than 1600 ram my mobo wont recognize or let it operate at that speed? Holy crap I didn't know that.. So if I want to see anything more than 1600 I would need to buy 1600 rated ram and OC them?
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I didnt mean to say that... im not really sure where that is in my reply but your Mobo is good to go for higher clocked memory. your Mobo will read it. Its good to go to 2800. You might have to change some values in the bios but its that easy.
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By video rendering I mean taking raw game data recorded from fraps, editing and then, well.. rendering it. I see your point, I really should have an i7 if I want to see time cut back on renders in that regard.
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Fraps is awesome.
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Great example, I totally see how ram makes a difference now, and how it won't really effect gaming so much.

What I'm understanding is it would be worthwhile to get at least 1600 ram and either leave it stock or OC if I really wanted to.

FFIW, I currently have http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231321[/quotemsg]
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Yes, id go nothing but 1600 and the stuff you have is pretty good. 4gb is on the lower end though, if your gaming alot and doing other stuff its probably going to do some good adding more. 2 x 2gb sticks are going to clog up all your slots fast though. Go to 4gb or 8gb sticks to give it a little upgrade room for future.

 

[hytecgowthaman]

transcend ram low cost and lifetime waranty so buy 4gb 1866mhz ram x2 or x4. directly in transcend.com .

 

[Brizors]

I run every game with msi afterburner and I like to turn the setting up as much as possible without dipping below 60fps.

The only thing that bugs me is the 2nd chart I linked in my first post, they are getting a 26 fps increase going from 1600 to 2400 in Far Cry2 and 7fps in crysis.

That's kinda worth it to me, I have my 3570k and gtx 670 ready to go in, I'm just thinking that fps increase is worth it to upgrade since ram is so cheap anyways.

What I'm wondering is if I get 2400 ram with slower timings than the ones in the chart used in the test, will that cancel out or hinder the fps gain?

Edit,
Now granted I personally game in 1080, and we don't know what ghx card they used, (or maybe they listed it but I haven't checked), but my point is results may vary and I may not get that much of a gain, but seeing how cheap ram is anyway, and that there was an increase, I hate to say it but I'm inclined to go higher than 1600. :/

 

[ilikemoneygreen]

Share how it goes dude. if the article you sourced is true though the 1866mhz ram the guy above recommended is not good. also dont go higher then 2133. Doesnt really leave a lot of options. ALso another note, though i skimmed the article it does appear that the tests were ran using the integrated graphics on the CPU. That might be different when your using that awesome 670 (im jealous btw ... i slowly pet my 650....)

"We must note, however, that such benefits can only be achieved after a twofold increase in clock rate whereas a single 266MHz step up leads to a mere 2-3% increase in speed.
So, the rational approach to choosing system memory is in looking for the optimal frequency/price ratio. Modules up to DDR3-2133 SDRAM may be recommended for Ivy Bridge platforms, but not faster ones."

 

[Brizors]

Ahhh the fine print.. alright tbh I'm sick of researching and trying to to find a definitive answer on this. I'm just going to bite the damned bullet and go with 2100 with the best timings I can find for the $$. Of all the places I've researched so far, 2100 has gotten the most votes, so I'm going with that! ..lol

And yeah this gtx 670 cost a pretty penny.. I was previously a radeon guy but got fed up with their drivers being late/not working right for game releases and the latest not being put on CCC or the website for that matter and instead their driver guy operating through twitter.. https://twitter.com/CatalystCreator. Also most games I play are nvidia optimized anyway so I figured I'd dish out the extra cash and try it out.

 

[ilikemoneygreen]

Ahhh the fine print.. alright tbh I'm sick of researching and trying to to find a definitive answer on this. I'm just going to bite the damned bullet and go with 2100 with the best timings I can find for the $$. Of all the places I've researched so far, 2100 has gotten the most votes, so I'm going with that! ..lol

And yeah this gtx 670 cost a pretty penny.. I was previously a radeon guy but got fed up with their drivers being late/not working right for game releases and the latest not being put on CCC or the website for that matter and instead their driver guy operating through twitter.. https://twitter.com/CatalystCreator. Also most games I play are nvidia optimized anyway so I figured I'd dish out the extra cash and try it out.

Im quoting this just to have a laugh, but literally a paragraph later they say "You shouldn’t bother about memory with low latencies, by the way. There are fewer such products on the market nowadays because low timings do not offer much in terms of performance on the modern LGA1155 platform."

Also yes, that gpu is pretty awesome. I think radeons are nice but i really like the Cuda cores. My friend has a really bad cpu in his new pc, but he followed my advice and got a 650ti. With that, he converted movies way faster that took so long before hand using Cuda. Its pretty useful for systems that arnt balanced right in a select set of programs that actually utilize it.

 

[Brizors]

That quote is also consistent with what I've been reading so I'm kinda happy to hear that.

I have had this 5850 for the past... 3years? and it's been so awesome.. handles everything I throw at at, maybe not on ultra, but solid fps on high.

Also I just OC'd my ram... even though it is 1600 it was operating at ~1280. So I just manually set the xmp and I'm at 1600 now, I can actually notice it!