OK I'm gonna be building a sandybridge rig once they get the ok again. I was looking at a an Asus mobo, I'm not doing SLI so I was going to get a more basic one but here is my question. If the mobo supports upto 2100mhz is it better to have 4gb of 2100mhz ram or 8gb of 1600mhz ram? The reason I ask this is I am doing it on a budget and don't want to pay too much, at the moment xms3 sticks can go for 35 pounds for 4gb 1600mhz whereas 4gb 2100mhz can go up over 70. Now at the moment my pc will be for media and games with a bit of photoshop so I'm pretty sure I'd never use 8gb but would I use 4gb and if so will the higher speed help out that much?
Have a look at this article, it'll give you a run down of the different speeds and how much of a difference they actually make. The 1600 will be fine and 4Gb will be as much as you need but 8Gb won't hurt to future proof the build.
Which chipset/cpu are you using? 2100 will give you more flexibility if you want to overclock Obviously 8GB will help with applications that can take advantage of it but for general use and gaming I've not found one that needs 8GB
Correct me if I'm wrong, but RAM prices are about to rise in the very near future so might be a good time to buy 8gb of the 1600mhz stuff. 4gb is getting quite close now to being borderline and could potentially be a limiting factor in the near future
Just wondering what actually uses nearly 4GB? When monitoring Ram usage, my system doesn't go much above 3GB in any game, I think this is to do with games designed with 32bit OS's in mind where the OS can use up to 2GB and applications also have 2GB at their disposal.
That was true up until Sandy Bridge. With Sandy Bridge, anything above 1600 CL9 is just a waste of money.
until mainstream games hit 64-bt there really is no point of more than 4GB if your PC is for gaming. they are however lots of porgrams that love to eat the RAM like CS5 CAD, VM etc etc so it really depends what you do with your PC. wiht regards to the OP 1600mhz is fine and you wont see any real benefits to using 2100mhz stuff unless your benchmarking.
I would go with the 8GB 1600 RAM. You won't notice any difference in speed outside of benchmarks, but that extra 4GB will come in handy at some point.
Going for quantity is by no means low on quantity. 1600MHz is by no means low quality DDR3. 8GB is the one to get, no point buying less if you can afford it.
i would get 8gb of the 1600, which is what i run now. while i haven't used it all in any non testing scenario (ie prime, etc) i have on a few occasions come around the 6gb mark in some of my bigger photoshop / illustrator projects. there are those few 64bit games out there too that take advantage of 5-6gb. and don't forget you can always make a ram disk on the 'spare' 4gb for swap use on 32bit games that page excessively that probably should have been 64bit.
Ok thanks everyone. I thought this was the case. I will get 8gb of 1600mhz ram. I'll get both at the same time to reduce the chance of any incompatibility probs although I will end up going for a sandybridge asus mobo once they're back.
