How much ram?

[slicedtoad]

aight, there seems to be mixed feelings about how much ram is useful. I'm helping a friend build a computer, this is it:
i5 2500k
SLI 560 ti
asus deluxe
some hdds in raid (he refuses ssds)
he isn't ocing anything (gpus are factory oced)
he's using it for games

he wants 16 GB of G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
is 16 gb actually useful? would 8 GB of lower latency, higher speed ram be better? Since he's using it for games and no game uses more than about 3GB, this would make sense to me.

edit: actually most games use around 1 GB don't they?

 

[ubercake]

8GB is absolutely fine.

Also, I'm guessing your friend wants a RAID 0 setup? Some people like RAID 0 setups, but if you don't have a bunch of PCs on the network doing simultaneous writes to the drives or a ton of concurrent write operations on a single machine, SATA drives in AHCI mode are just fine for a gaming setup. A couple of WD blacks have provided great performance for me, gaming or otherwise. I use one for apps and one for data. I would explain to him the expense of trying to recover data from a RAID 0 setup if one of the disks goes bad. It's the most expensive data recovery operation out there.

 

[slicedtoad]

will 8GB of say G.SKILL Ripjaws X + Turbulence II Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) be better than the 16 gb of the ram i previously mentioned?

yeah he'll do a raid 0 setup. data recovery is not a priority because he's just gaming

 

[ubercake]

I honestly don't think you'd see a noticeable difference. I'd take the least expensive option.

 

[slicedtoad]

Best answer selected by slicedtoad.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey