Memory When you buy memory what's the most important factor?

Anything that has a sweet looking heatsink and a high frequency.

 

1. Price (usually tied to brand and retailer)
2. timings
3. Overclockability/Frequency (usually tied to brand)

 

1. Price
2. Brand (No preference between the big players, but I'm not buying the cheap green stuff. This also factors in warranty here.)
3. Speed
4. Everything Else

 

1. Frequency
2. Price
3. Review/Brand, I like to go with Corsair since I've never had problem with them before

 

I check out benchmarks to see what the lowest frequency/highest timings I can get away with while not seeing major performance drops then buy based on Brand/Price.

Or at least I used to before Hynix decided they needed to increase their profits by 400%.

 

I haven't voted because I might skew your results:
1. Price
2. What chips are in there (for OC purposes)
3. Appearance? No bling.

 

Anyone mind telling me why latency isn't on this list?

 

Forgot Chalk it up to frequency.

 

I almost always buy Crucial. Their advisor tool takes the hassle out of finding the right chips, they are competative on price and when I've had RAM go bad in the past they've replaced it without any hassle with their life time warranty.

 

PRICE
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Somewhat later, Frequency and timings

I don't care about brand, colour, look or heatsinks.

 

Plus they have pretty flashing lights on some of their kits!

 

price and size of module.

right now I would kill for a set of 2x2Gb DDR2 PC-6400 (800MHz) for £30 like it use to be.

 

+1 theres always second hand mind =p

 

Bah! I was juuuust about to vote in this thread when I noticed the absence of probably the most important criterium for me, ECC. I don't buy non-ECC memory at all...

 

SPEED ,SPEED, SPEED. It's all about the speed man ! And a decent price running a close 2nd.

The stupid thing is, Ive found that cheap lower speed memory over clocks better than the top of the range stuff , but better stability and higher CPU clock speeds with the more expensive stuff.

 

Memory searching process goes as follows:

1. Certain speed is determined to be what I want, list is made of memory at the correct frequency and sorted by latency, or correct ranges of frequency and latency
2. List is filtered by preferred/trusted brands
3. Prices are viewed, lowest cost of each latency/frequency combination are arranged into new list
4. Most efficient price to performance choice is selected, provided I am confident that it will fulfill my requirements.

As such: brand, frequency and price were all listed in the poll. Heatsink design may play a factor with coolers, but it is secondary. Color means nothing. Voltage means little, as long as it will work in my system. Warranty means little, retailer means nothing since I only use one.

 

I've aimed for 1:1 ratios between frequency and FSB/DMI/QPI, ideally with lower latency...

I spent £100 on 2x2GB @1,600MHz for my i3 build - I spent more than double on the 4x1GB in my LGA775 rig 2 years ago but did so when DDR2 was still mainstream - on the basis that spending the extra would allow me to use the RAM in a future build (it made sense when upgrading from an LGA478 mobo with DDR support to bypass DDR2)

 

why 1:1 ratios they have no impact on performance ?

 

Timings, Design, Brand, Reviews.

 

anybody who says anything other than colour is lying.