8gb vs 16gb DDR3 on P67 I5 2500K

[louno]

I am working on my next build and I'm not sure if I should go with 8gb or 16gb of ram ?

I know that in the past, there were times where more memory was not necessarely better, even sometimes it would cause reduced performance, I wonder if this will still be the case ?

I will be using windows 7 64bit for OS.

I have a dualscreen setup.

I will have a SSD as main OS / Program drive.

I use my computer mainly for work and gaming.

Work involves photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver. ( I am a webdesigner ) I am a very intensive multi-tasking guy, just as an example, I currently have about 5 programs open, i have 2 firefox browsers each with over 20 tabs...

Gaming currently is limited to SC2, League Of Legends, and BF2142 , but that will change with my new system...

Do you advice 8gb or 16gb ( DDR3 1600 )?
If i get 8gb, I can put the money on the GPU...

Overall my next build should be around 2000$.

Thx for your advises.

 

[Lomzaman3]

I have 16 gigs of RAM. It has gone down in price so much that I thought I'd throw in the secound 8 Gigs just to max out Windows 7 Home premium that I run(64 bit version) After several months of use I feel the second 8 gig set was a waste of money. I start task manager and always have 10 to 12 gigs or so sitting around not being used. I surf the 'net and play Dragon Age, work with with MS Office 2010 in which I put together PowerPoint training presentations. But I never use more than 10 gigs out of the 16 I have installed. Occasionally when the PowerPoint presentation gets large I may go up to 10 Gigs but that is rare.
I Think that 8 to 10 Gigs of a good low latency RAM would be all you'd ever use even under heavy use.
My Build (I am both an enthusiast and think you get a better computer when you put it together yourself without all the useless programs and fluff that you have to eradicate.)
i5-2500K
16 Gigs RAM ADATA (8 would have been enough)
OCZ SSD 120 gig for operating system and MS OfFice
1 TB Western Digital Black SATA3
MSI GTX 460 Video card
2X ASUS cd/dvd burners
AsRock P67 Extreme Gen3 Motherboard

Do you advice 8gb or 16gb ( DDR3 1600 )?
If i get 8gb, I can put the money on the GPU...

Overall my next build should be around 2000$.

Thx for your advises.[/quotemsg]

 

[Lomzaman3]

I have 16 gigs of RAM. It has gone down in price so much that I thought I'd throw in the secound 8 Gigs just to max out Windows 7 Home premium that I run(64 bit version) After several months of use I feel the second 8 gig set was a waste of money. I start task manager and always have 10 to 12 gigs or so sitting around not being used. I surf the 'net and play Dragon Age, work with with MS Office 2010 in which I put together PowerPoint training presentations. But I never use more than 10 gigs out of the 16 I have installed. Occasionally when the PowerPoint presentation gets large I may go up to 10 Gigs but that is rare.
I Think that 8 to 10 Gigs of a good low latency RAM would be all you'd ever use even under heavy use.
My Build (I am both an enthusiast and think you get a better computer when you put it together yourself without all the useless programs and fluff that you have to eradicate.)
i5-2500K
16 Gigs RAM ADATA (8 would have been enough)
OCZ SSD 120 gig for operating system and MS OfFice
1 TB Western Digital Black SATA3
MSI GTX 460 Video card
2X ASUS cd/dvd burners
AsRock P67 Extreme Gen3 Motherboard

 

[wolfram23]

OP: For your work, definitely go with 4x4gb (or 2x4gb+2x2gb).

While gaming won't see any difference, your multitasking will. I've used up all 8gbs before, so it's not like it's a huge amount these days. Hell, Battlefield 3 uses over 6gb sometimes.

Also, get a 120gb SSD. Or at least 80/90gb. They say those 60gb SSDs are good as boot drives but honestly it would be such a pain in the ass. I have been pretty anal about my file storage and all that, all of my music, movies, games, docs are all on my HDDs, etc. So just Windows and apps like iTunes, photoshop, Office, etc use up about 56gb.

With a $2000 budget, if that's only for the hardware and not monitor and accessories, you can build a sick PC with all that RAM and an SSD and even CFX/SLI GPUs.

Oh, and if you're going to do any video transcoding, you HAVE to get a Z68 board with Quick Sync/Virtu.

 

[mrbrown510]

DONT LISTEN TO THEM JUST GET 16GB OF DDR3 ITS 99 BUCKS RIGHT NOW Y WOULDNT U WANNA MAX OUT UR SYSTEM AT THESE REDICULOUS CHEAP PRICES I GOT 16GB OF CORSAIR DDR3 1600MHZ CORSAIR RAM FOR 102 BUCKS AFTER TAXES.ON GAMING THE EXTRA RAM SPEEDS UP LOADING TIMES AND ANY LITTLE LOAD U HAD ON UR CPU WILL BE PUT ON THE RAM FIRST.U GUYS WE ARE NOT IN 2007 ANYMORE WHERE 16GB OF RAM IS 1000 BUCKS ITS A DAM BENJAMIN

 

[wolfram23]

DONT LISTEN TO THEM JUST GET 16GB OF DDR3 ITS 99 BUCKS RIGHT NOW Y WOULDNT U WANNA MAX OUT UR SYSTEM AT THESE REDICULOUS CHEAP PRICES I GOT 16GB OF CORSAIR DDR3 1600MHZ CORSAIR RAM FOR 102 BUCKS AFTER TAXES.ON GAMING THE EXTRA RAM SPEEDS UP LOADING TIMES AND ANY LITTLE LOAD U HAD ON UR CPU WILL BE PUT ON THE RAM FIRST.U GUYS WE ARE NOT IN 2007 ANYMORE WHERE 16GB OF RAM IS 1000 BUCKS ITS A DAM BENJAMIN

Please don't use caps like that.

I also do agree that for him it's worthwhile to get it but your reasoning is not sound. It's literally double the price of 8gb... putting that $50 towards a better GPU will give much better gaming results than the RAM. Also it will not help speed up loading. A solid state drive will help with loads tremendously, but for the RAM as long as you don't max it out it will not speed up gaming.

As I reasoned in my last post, it's useful for him since he'll probably use up a lot of RAM with his non gaming stuff.

 

[mrbrown510]

true and sorry for the caps.but come on later on ddr4 will come out and then when he want to get 16gb it will be more expensive.when i had lga 775 people told me to get 8gb instead of 16gb.it use to be so cheap i wish i had gotten the 16gb now 16gb of ddr2 is 400 bucks.so you see its better for him to just max out his ram right now because later on it will just be a waste of money since it will be expensive .and if he does photoshop as a source of income its a no brainer.i use my pc for both gaming and as a daw audio production pc thats y i got 1055t,16gb of ram and a 6850 instead of 8gb and a 6870 or 6950

 

[BMWM3]

I am currently working in Graphic Design and I just got 16GB of ram, and I can't tell you how much I love the entire 109$ I spent on it.... I also bought an AMD Phenom II x6 1090T Processor.... I work with all of the Auto Desk programs, as well as RealFlow 2012 and Adobe CS5, and some others, but rendering time on MAJOR projects is fast as hell.... Yeah it is overkill, but in the same breath, I don't have any down time due to overloading my ram... If I had 8GB I would most definitely see that... RealFlow alone works with over 5 million particles to create a SMALL ocean scene.... That program is more than happy with 16GB, IMO get it... Better to be safe than sorry

 

[niceget]

RAM, Scratchpad, Photoshop:

You should let Windows 7 manage your RAM. Photoshop usually defaults to use 50% if you have enough RAM although you can change this.

For example, if you have 8GB and run Photoshop it will allocate 4GB of the System RAM for itself that is used by nothing else.

There is no reason to use another program to try to force Photoshop to use more RAM since it already works perfectly.

There are some unique cases where forcing RAM to be used in certain ways can be good but Photoshop is not one of them. Again, you can already tell Photoshop how much RAM to use.

RAM, Scratchpad, Photoshop:

You should let Windows 7 manage your RAM. Photoshop usually defaults to use 50% if you have enough RAM although you can change this.

For example, if you have 8GB and run Photoshop it will allocate 4GB of the System RAM for itself that is used by nothing else.

There is no reason to use another program to try to force Photoshop to use more RAM since it already works perfectly.

There are some unique cases where forcing RAM to be used in certain ways can be good but Photoshop is not one of them. Again, you can already tell Photoshop how much RAM to use.

I see he is using a Solid State Drive. One should disable all unnecessary writing to the SSD. No Page Filing and no Cache for that drive. BUT, always have a battery back-up plugged-in to your box.

OCZ OCZSSD2 Vertex Plus 2.5" Solid State Drive - 120GB [primary]
Western Digital 1TB backup HDD [secondary - 3 partitions]
Corsair Hydro H60 CPU Liquid Cooling
Ultra X-Blaster ATX Black Mid-Tower Case with Clear Side
Ultra ULT40135 Performance 120mm Case Fan [front and back]
Asus M4A88T-V EVO USB3 Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition Processor
Transcend 2000MHz aXeRam Overclocking Memory Kit 16GB
Corsair CMPSU-650TXV2 Enthusiast Series
PNY GeForce GTX 460 1GB GDDR5 PCI-e VCGGTX4601XP

 

[Conan Of Rottingham]

For clarity: I'm running one 8GB kit and one 4GB kit in dual channel on a P67 mainboard with a 2500K Sandy Bridge processor. That's how I got 12GB. I previously had a system with 4GB of RAM, and I can definitely tell the difference in multitasking without the aid of a stopwatch.

Loading levels once the game starts will also be positively affected, leading to a smoother-feeling game experience. The games themselves won't play differently but they will look differently with higher detail levels and less graphical anomalies like missing textures and such. This also makes for a better gaming experience. Any time a game has to pause/stop and load anything at all, more RAM makes it faster. These are not measurable with benchmarks and stopwatches -- they are subjective (but very real) differences.

If you get two kits of the same kind of RAM at the same time, you minimize (to as close to zero as you can get) the likelihood of incompatibilities and instabilities that can cause slowdowns. Of course, sometimes boards can't populate all four RAM slots unless you loosen the timings, but that tends to happen mainly to older boards.

I still recommend 12GB or 16GB.

I also agree with "leaps" that more ram is better... i have a system that would not run Battlefield 3 on Ultra with 4 gigs of DDR3 1866mhz ram. By Upgrading "JUST" my ram to 16gb 4gb x 4 sticks.... Battlefield 3 by itself loads 4x faster and plays without stutter...my opinion is overkill is not a bad thing.. I love overkill, and disagree with anyone who says overkill is not necessary. Overkill = Futureproof!.... like the days of DDR-Ram people said 512mb is plenty and 1gig of ram is overkill... Those who bought 2gb kits back then were the only smart ones for really overkilling the requirements. Before you know it, 5 years from now 16gb of ram will be a joke and laughed at as a thing of the past. I say go 8gb if on a budget or 16gb if you have the cash! DDR3 ram is cheap!

 

[Conan Of Rottingham]

I am working on my next build and I'm not sure if I should go with 8gb or 16gb of ram ?

I know that in the past, there were times where more memory was not necessarely better, even sometimes it would cause reduced performance, I wonder if this will still be the case ?

I will be using windows 7 64bit for OS.

I have a dualscreen setup.

I will have a SSD as main OS / Program drive.

I use my computer mainly for work and gaming.

Work involves photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver. ( I am a webdesigner ) I am a very intensive multi-tasking guy, just as an example, I currently have about 5 programs open, i have 2 firefox browsers each with over 20 tabs...

Gaming currently is limited to SC2, League Of Legends, and BF2142 , but that will change with my new system...

Do you advice 8gb or 16gb ( DDR3 1600 )?
If i get 8gb, I can put the money on the GPU...

Overall my next build should be around 2000$.

Thx for your advises.

I also agree with "leaps" that more ram is better... i have a system that would not run Battlefield 3 on Ultra with 4 gigs of DDR3 1866mhz ram. By Upgrade "JUST" my ram to 16gb 4gb x 4 sticks.... Battlefield 3 by itself loads 4x faster and plays without stutter...my opinion is overkill is not a bad thing.. I love overkill, and disagree with anyone who says overkill is not necessary. Overkill = Futureproof!.... like the days of DDR-Ram people said 512mb is plenty and 1gig of rams is overkill... Those who bought 2gb kits where the only smart one for really overkilling the requirements. Before you know it, 5 years from now 16gb of ram will be a joke and laughed at and a thing of the past. I say go 8gb if on a budget or 16gb if you have the cash! DDR3 ram is cheap!

 

[photonboy]

This thread is well over a year old. I recommend it being closed.

The amount of RAM has specific threads. The general consensus is 4GB for non-gamers, 8GB for gamers, and more for those with programs that can make use of it (Adobe CS video editing etc).

 

[Perryno1]

i got 16gb gskill ram because i can afford it, and it runs at the same spec as the equivilent 8gb kit from gskill. It has insane specs - 2133 mhz cas 9, and thats 16gb. Find me another manufacturer guaranteeing that speed with 16gb, even the almighty corsair doesnt match that. This ram is amazing.

if you want to check it out here is the link

http://www.gskill.com/products.php?index=371

Below is a decent option for 16GB. it has better latency timings than the gskill. However the Gskill has a faster clock speed. If you dont want to spend as much on the Gskill (£140) then those guys at ~£85 are brilliant value for money! havent found anything similar in price to match it.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0066135BI/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00

 

[A Bad Day]

AH, just go with 16 Gigs. Create a ram disk 4 -> 8 Gigs for scratch pad.

Free ramdisk driver limits you to 4 gigs, I think the paid version is like $10 bucks.
Bench marks for a ram disk is like comparing a tutle (SSD) to a sportscar.
One drawback if you create a ramdisk and set it to save on power down and load on bootup it will add time to both operations.

Added:
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

If you're going with Ramdisk, DO NOT load any temp/tmp files into it because the software depends on those, and sometimes it will not boot up after a shutdown/restart.

Personally, I find Ramdisk too much of a hassle, but if your storage system has great sequential read/write performance, then go for it. If not, stay away as a 4 GB file is quite a heavy load.

 

[teh camper]

AH, just go with 16 Gigs. Create a ram disk 4 -> 8 Gigs for scratch pad.

Free ramdisk driver limits you to 4 gigs, I think the paid version is like $10 bucks.
Bench marks for a ram disk is like comparing a tutle (SSD) to a sportscar.
One drawback if you create a ramdisk and set it to save on power down and load on bootup it will add time to both operations.

Added:
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

If you're going with Ramdisk, DO NOT load any temp/tmp files into it because the software depends on those, and sometimes it will not boot up after a shutdown/restart.

Personally, I find Ramdisk too much of a hassle, but if your storage system has great sequential read/write performance, then go for it. If not, stay away as a 4 GB file is quite a heavy load.

yeah man i agree with you. loading temp files into ramdisk is just asking for trouble. i was unable to install/uninstall anything after doing that. right now im just using them for internet cache files.

 

[thepcguru]

RAM, Scratchpad, Photoshop:
You should let Windows 7 manage your RAM.

Windows always manages RAM, even if you've partitioned a RAMdisk, no?

Photoshop usually defaults to use 50% if you have enough RAM although you can change this....There is no reason to use another program to try to force Photoshop to use more RAM since it already works perfectly.

Yes, but Photoshop still wants to know where to place a scratch disk.

I think what RetiredChief is saying is that you can set up a virtual hard drive — called a RAMdisk — which will reserve, say, 4GB of your physical RAM and call it Volume G, for example. Then in Photoshop, you can asign Volume G to be your scratch disk.

But I am curious, Photonboy. Are you saying that Photoshop will never use your assigned scratch disk until it maxes out using the RAM you've assigned to Photoshop? i.e. I have 16GB Physical RAM. I assign 50% to Photoshop. So Photoshop will ONLY use the scratch disk AFTER it maxes out the available 8GB of RAM? Or does Photoshop use it's available RAM for some operations, while using it's scratch disk for others?

If it works like a windows page file, from what I understand, it will fill the scratch disk with a COPY of whats in RAM periodically before RAM is maxed so that the OS and Apps can quickly free RAM if needed for other data, but still recall the data quickly from scratch if needed. It keeps the oldest, less frequently used data in the page file like a memory cache, but slower of course. In my experience, setting a scratch disk into a RAM drive should speed up the I/O dumping part that happens in the background, or in memory demanding situations. If anything, the I/O 'process' will end quicker allowing the CPU thread to work on other tasks sooner, but more importantly the cached data will be where it needs to be sooner, for later retrieval if needed.