What Type or Ram?

[kkeddy]

Hi everyone, I haven't built a computer for many years, I felt like this black friday will be a good chance for me to do so.

Here is what I am looking into,

I5 3570k ($150 black friday sale) (canada)
Asus p8Z77-v LK ($120)

I do plan to OC it, but not anything over 4ghz,

Now the question is, What kind of RAM should I be getting? 1600/1800/2200 or higher?

I know the most popular is probably the 1600.

I am probably looking at 2x8GB sticks, what is a good brand or type for this? I plan to upgrade to 32gb in the future.

I did some research most people suggested 8gb ram is more than enough for basic internet, and gaming.

My purpose of this machine is neither of that. This machine will be more of a multi functional PC

I am a networking student (or just graduated) I need the ram to power all my virtual machines (vmware) to build my "virtual lab environment" for testing (WinServer, Linux distros etc). Right now on my laptop I have 8gb of ram and that barely handles 4 VM's at once. vCenter Server Appliance uses 8gb of ram itself..

I know my criteria for this build is not as common as everyone, and did google searches, but haven't came up with a good answer yet.

Let me know what is good!

My budget for the ram will be under $100 for the 16gb, with the ability to upgrade another 16gb on top in the future.

 

[butremor]

Right.
Good RAM is Corsair, G.Skill, Kingston. Stick with 1600MHz. Make sure you get 1.5V. And get low profile RAM (means low heatsinks).

 

[kkeddy]

Thanks for the response How about timings? that won't matter too much right??

 

[butremor]

Naaah... Just get CL9, thats what matters

 

[brandon402]

These would be cool on the blue Asus motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233367

9 or 10 latency is fine, I just wouldn't get 11s. Of course 9 is slightly preferable, but I wouldn't let a 10 latency stop me from getting ram sticks I liked. As butremor said 1600mhz and 1.5 volts, intel recommends 1.5 volt ram

 

[kkeddy]

here is what i ended up with.

i5 3570k - $149 (black friday deal)
p8z77v-lk - $100 (bf deal)
OCZ Vertex 3 SSD 128gb - $50 (bf deal)
antec three hundred case - $FREE (had one laying around)
ANTEC high current modular 620w PSU - $FREE (had one laying around)
Cosair XMS3 8gbx2 dual channel - $50 (BF dea)

ATI HD5770

so over all the build was good, everything is working smoothly. Until I installed the Video card.

Lets just say, i spent about 4 days, figuring out what was wrong with the video card.

Story: Video card works fine on the standard VGA drivers provided by Windows. Once I install ATI CCC is when everything goes bad news. After it asks to restart i hit yes, it will say "starting windows" and than my monitor will show cannot detect display.

Hours and hours of research - it happens ONLY when i install the driver. So i reboot into safe mode, remove the driver (driver sweeper, system restore, tried many diff methods after the many times reinstalling different versions of drivers from 8 all the way to the latest beta drivers) non worked. same issue.

Now at this point I figured i will do a fresh install, and let WINDOWS UPDATE install my video drivers which it did. Worked for about 5-10 min, and screen froze. And never booted back to normal windows again (it could still boot to safe mode)

Now at this time, i decided to see if it was the OS issue. So I installed XP 32 bit. Guess what? SAME PROBLEM!!

So I have came to a conclusion it is either my BIOS setting on my asus board i am doing something wrong (everything was reset to default to troubleshoot)

OR

MY video card is just dead.

It has been a frustrating experience for me, but as I type I am using the onboard HD4000 for now.

I may be picking up a GTX550ti or a GTX560ti sometime later this week if I cannot find a answer to my problem.

Oh and I also tried using the second PCI-E slot (my asus board has 2) Same problem. Seems to me like right when windows loads the driver thats when it does not show a display

Some said it may be the Driver signature enforcement thing. I downloaded WHQL(sp?) drivers, no work. tried booting by disabling driver signature enforcement (f8 when you start windows) same issue.

I can't think of any other reasons.

Any ideas anyone?

I am pretty sad myself as a network administrator/helpdesk support I can't even fix my own computer!