What type of Ram is recommended?

[XcvcX]

What would be classified as one of the best RAM sticks to purchase for a higher end PC? Is there a name brand that's looked at higher than other name brands?


Thanks!

 

[Rishwin]

Depends, what motherboard do you have? DDR2 or DDR3? What's the fastest RAM your motherboard supports?

There are plenty of high-end RAM companies, but depending on the components you have one brand would suit you better than another. There is no one specific brand which will ALWAYS be better than the rest.

 

[Alfons]

OCZ,Corsair,Crucial,Mushkin, G.Skill. They're all pretty good. It's a matter of personal opinion to be honest. I've always gone for corsair because all my experiences with their products were awesome. Corsair also gives lifetime warranty on RAM, and quite a few years on other products (5-7 years on psu's, etc).

So my vote goes to corsair (corsair dominator sticks in particular)

I've seen people get hyped about Gskill ripjaws too.

 

[Rishwin]

OCZ,Corsair,Crucial,Mushkin, G.Skill. They're all pretty good. It's a matter of personal opinion to be honest. I've always gone for corsair because all my experiences with their products were awesome. Corsair also gives lifetime warranty on RAM, and quite a few years on other products (5-7 years on psu's, etc).

So my vote goes to corsair (corsair dominator sticks in particular)

I've seen people get hyped about Gskill ripjaws too.

I would put Crucial and Mushkin a the top of my list, but like i said it depends on what components it's going with.

I look specifically for frequency and timing and voltage when it comes to RAM, and sometimes an "inferior" brand will have RAM which when paired with the right components will out-perform the rest. The high-end companies might have higher frequency and better timings, but if their voltages are too high for my liking I'll skip over them completely. The frequency might be high and voltages may be low, but higher timings are another deal breaker. It's all about finding the equilibrium.

I don't like compromising when it comes to performance.

 

[Alfons]

I would put Crucial and Mushkin a the top of my list, but like i said it depends on what components it's going with.

I look specifically for frequency and timing and voltage when it comes to RAM, and sometimes an "inferior" brand will have RAM which when paired with the right components will out-perform the rest.

I don't have any experience with either of those two brands, they're not very common in the EU. Not a lot of shops sell them. Corsair is pretty much leading the market for enthousiast RAM here, and kingston for workstations mostly.

I also look at the specific specs but I try to find that in Corsair RAM mostly . Price/performance ratio is what I value most. I'm not paying 50 bucks extra for C8 sticks instead of C9. So far Corsair always has hit the sweet spot for me.

I've seen people swear by mushkin but it's pretty much a personal preference.

 

[Rishwin]

Low voltage low timing RAM overclocks AMAZINGLY. If I'm building an overclocking PC then to me the extra cost is worth it. Especially on a decent EVGA board with their XMP memory profiles.

I mean on my previous PC which i sold before i left Australia, i spent $300 on 8GB of 2200MHz Geil DDR3 lol. It was quite amazing, but it didn't leave any room for overclocking and i like to be able to squeeze that extra value out of my components. But then again i got the total cost of the PC back when i sold it so that was good.

 

[Alfons]

Low voltage low timing RAM overclocks AMAZINGLY. If I'm building an overclocking PC then to me the extra cost is worth it. Especially on a decent EVGA board with their XMP memory profiles.

I mean on my previous PC which i sold before i left Australia, i spent $300 on 8GB of 2200MHz Geil DDR3 lol. It was quite amazing, but it didn't leave any room for overclocking and i like to be able to squeeze that extra value out of my components. But then again i got the total cost of the PC back when i sold it so that was good.

Aye I always try to get low voltage sticks. I think I'm better off with a low voltage kit then a low latency kit. The difference between C9 and C8 (on ddr3-1600mhz in my case) isn't all that great, but low volt kits give you more OC headroom indeed. Not that I'm a big fan of oc'ing RAM anyways tt1:. I mainly play games and oc'ing the RAM won't give me a big performance boost. I'd rather oc my cpu and gfx cards if I have to, but with a 2500k @4.5 and two 570's I shouldn't have to oc in the first place. I just do it for fun, and more fps is always nice to see (even though anything beyond 60 doesn't matter).

*offtopic*

New "home-server" parts are arriving tomorrow, pretty excited.

i5 2400 3.1ghz
asus p8h67-i mini-itx mobo
8gb ddr3 1333mhz corsair
scythe big shuriken cpu cooler
ocz vertex 2 60gb ssd (for running Windows Home Server 2011)
2x wd green 2tb hdd
fractal design array r2 (shuweeeeet mini-itx case, google it)

 

[Rishwin]

Nooooo, not the WD greens >_>

They are horrible drives with a life-span of like 6 months lol. The "energy saving" controllers on them are flawed so when they drop down to power saving mode the drive usually loses power completely and data corruption occurs. It's a pretty common problem with them, so far i've had 6 of them die and opted to throw them away rather than have WD replace them with more Green's.

 

[cycoextreme]

*offtopic*

New "home-server" parts are arriving tomorrow, pretty excited.

i5 2400 3.1ghz
asus p8h67-i mini-itx mobo
8gb ddr3 1333mhz corsair
scythe big shuriken cpu cooler
ocz vertex 2 60gb ssd (for running Windows Home Server 2011)
2x wd green 2tb hdd
fractal design array r2 (shuweeeeet mini-itx case, google it)

1. The mobo supports SOCKET 1155, the heatsink supports 1156 socket, so if it fits good luck
2. make sure you get SODIMMs for the ram, which i think you know already.
3. the mobo only has 2 6GBs SATA ports, and 2 3GBs SATA, so i hope you put the SSD on the 6 GB port, and i dont know if your doing a RAID setup or not with the data drives which should go on the 3GBs ports.
4. I agree with rish the WD green drives suck, the PSU may not be much in your case but you can do better for HDDs, my brother had a green drive, he had it one year and took a poop on him, ive had my 500Gb drive for about 5 years, and its still going

 

[Alfons]

1. The mobo supports SOCKET 1155, the heatsink supports 1156 socket, so if it fits good luck
2. make sure you get SODIMMs for the ram, which i think you know already.
3. the mobo only has 2 6GBs SATA ports, and 2 3GBs SATA, so i hope you put the SSD on the 6 GB port, and i dont know if your doing a RAID setup or not with the data drives which should go on the 3GBs ports.
4. I agree with rish the WD green drives suck, the PSU may not be much in your case but you can do better for HDDs, my brother had a green drive, he had it one year and took a poop on him, ive had my 500Gb drive for about 5 years, and its still going

1. It fits.
2. The deluxe edition needs sodimms, not the normal edition.
3. I went for the vertex 2 which is sata 2, mainly because I already have two WD Black SATA6gbs lying around which will be on the two sata 6gbs ports. That leaves 4 sata 2 ports for 1 vertex 2 and 2 wd greens. (I've got two vertex2's in raid 0 in my desktop, and there was a sweet deal on another one)
4. Already ordered, I'll see how long they last.

Didn't mean to hijack a thread so lets get back on topic