Is performance grade memory really worth the price?
<div class="IPBDescription">your opinion please, backed with data</div>Well?
For newbies, know that there are 3 main things when shopping for memory:
Size: in powers of 2, current chips are measured in MB or GB
Speed: Depends on type, but with DDR2 for example, a higher speed wih faster timings is faster memory.
Grade/Quality: Value, Normal, or Performance
What matters most in your opinion? Would you spend more for a performance grade memory DIMM when you could buy the same size in a slightly faster speed chip that is normal grade?
I'm curious too see your opinions. And <i>please</i> back your arguements up with some sort of data.
For newbies, know that there are 3 main things when shopping for memory:
Size: in powers of 2, current chips are measured in MB or GB
Speed: Depends on type, but with DDR2 for example, a higher speed wih faster timings is faster memory.
Grade/Quality: Value, Normal, or Performance
What matters most in your opinion? Would you spend more for a performance grade memory DIMM when you could buy the same size in a slightly faster speed chip that is normal grade?
I'm curious too see your opinions. And <i>please</i> back your arguements up with some sort of data.
Comments
If you're going to install it, adjust it for peak performance, and then never touch it again, then no it's not worth the price.
Yes, that's good information for the general community. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" /> However, I knew all that, the question I asked was do <i>you</i> think it's worth the price?
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I misunderstood the question.
So if all you do is surf the web and do nothing that puts your CPU usage over like 10% then value ram is fine. If you do any gaming, overclocking or anything that stresses your CPU then yes performance ram imo is worth it. The ability to maintain high bandwidth with the lowest timings will give performance increase in the apps that will use it. The most important factor is stability which very few value ram can provide. Now you dont need 600 dollar gaming ram thats running at 1200MHZ. Some decent 800MHZ or what ever your motherboard supports will be fine as long as its not 'value ram'. Some people have good results with cheap ram but I prefer to pay the little extra.
It can be immensely annoying to have to troubleshoot RAM failures, but if the cheap stuff works the way it's supposed to right away it's hard to rationalize the price difference.
I guess it's sort of a gamble.
- you have a lot of noncontiguous* stuff being read from memory (as part of a caching mechanism) because the CAS latency is a bit lower on the expensive stuff
- two weeks/six months/ten years later when the cheapo stick fails
you will not notice the difference when:
- large chunks are being read into cache (that's your harddrive being slow)
- large, contiguous* chunks are being read from cache (in theory, the memory controller will know to request certain bits of memory and pull it over to the CPU's cache and queue up the next requests so that the data arrives as soon as it's ready to be processed, allowing the memory to function at near-maximum speed ... yeah. it's still fast enough that it's most often the CPU that's the bottleneck.)
as opposed to disk storage where contiguous means "physically next to," the word in this context describes pieces of data that would logically be requested in quick succession (or so the caching mechanism is lead to believe. this is what we call a cache-miss. they suck.)
edit: if you really, really, really want me to get the stats, i'll see if i can find them (but they're stats for five year old server architectures)
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yes
<a href="http://dynamic.nasdaq.com/asp/PMI.asp" target="_blank">data</a>