RAM and Gaming Question

[ostitcho]

For games now days such as Star Citizen, Escape From Tarkov, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. What type of RAM, speeds, and amounts of RAM should I be looking to upgrade to? DDR3? DDR4?

 

[Shektron]

1. DDR3 or DDR4 depends on what motherboard/CPU you have.
2. RAM speed depends on whether it's DDR3 or DDR4.
3. Amount should be 16 GB, regardless of other factors. 8 GB will work, but 16 is recommended.

 

[Scott N]

16gb Ddr4.

 

[Zerk2012]

Depends on the motherboard and processor as to what type and speed memory you can use.

 

[ostitcho]

1. DDR3 or DDR4 depends on what motherboard/CPU you have.
2. RAM speed depends on whether it's DDR3 or DDR4.
3. Amount should be 16 GB, regardless of other factors. 8 GB will work, but 16 is recommended.

Well currently I have a 6300 CPU and GA-78LMT-USB3 6.0 MoBo

 

[manddy123]

Deppends exclusively on your current motherboard capabilities.

You can't add a DDR4 RAM stick in a mobo that support only DDR3 or vice-versa.

About speed, DDR4 are normally faster than DDR3 by a fair amount. To be real, the difference between speeds within the same RAM type are neglegibe to humans eyes, but on benchmarks they'll show a fair difference, IMHO you should pick the one that's faster while still keeping inside your budget.
More about DDR3 vs DDR4: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1837908/ddr3-ddr4.html

About quantity, the sweetspot right now is 16GB, while 4GB being the bare minimum and 8GB being a budget option. Most games recommended specs ask for 8GB, so i wouldn't go lower than that, and if you wanna proof yourself 16GB is way to go.

EDIT:
As OP have stated he has a DDR3 capable MOBO, i'd advise getting some brand new 2x8GB DDR3 sticks kit

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Type = whatever matches your motherboard's RAM type

Speed = best that fits in your budget. There is very little increase in price up to a certain point. Below 3200, it's usually easy to justify; after that any increases in speed start coming in bigger and bigger price premiums.

CAS - As important as speed. Higher speeds are faster, lower CAS is faster.

Amount - 2 x 4GB was the recommended amount forgaming way back in 2010; many argue it's still valid. At this point, not many games show improvement with 16 GB (*GTAV and Wicther 3 come to mind ~ 5 - 10%) but that will increase over time.

Configuration - Always buy RAM in matched pairs. In order for you RAM to run in dual channel" mode, you need to have dual sticks. So that means buying 2 x 8GB (or 2 x 4gb / 2 x 16BG) in the same package. On a workstation platform (quad channel) you'd want to but 4 x 4 GB or 4 x 8GB, etc.

EDIR: The moBo information is helpful

According to Gigabytes spec page, your board supports ....

4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 32 GB of system memory (Note 1)
Dual channel memory architecture
Support for 1600(O.C.)/1333/1066 MHz memory modules

That doesn't leave you many options

 

[ostitcho]

Deppends exclusively on your current motherboard capabilities.

You can't add a DDR4 RAM stick in a mobo that support only DDR3 or vice-versa.

About speed, DDR4 are normally faster than DDR3 by a fair amount. To be real, the difference between speeds within the same RAM type are neglegibe to humans eyes, but on benchmarks they'll show a fair difference, IMHO you should pick the one that's faster while still keeping inside your budget.
More about DDR3 vs DDR4: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1837908/ddr3-ddr4.html

About quantity, the sweetspot right now is 16GB, while 4GB being the bare minimum and 8GB being a budget option. Most games recommended specs ask for 8GB, so i wouldn't go lower than that, and if you wanna proof yourself 16GB is way to go.

EDIT:
As OP have stated he has a DDR3 capable MOBO, i'd advise getting some brand new 2x8GB DDR3 sticks kit

At what speeds and CAS? At some point in the future I will upgrade to a better Mobo and want it to be able to use higher speeds then as well as work with what I do now.

 

[manddy123]

At what speeds and CAS? At some point in the future I will upgrade to a better Mobo and want it to be able to use higher speeds then as well as work with what I do now.

CAS are just another thing IMHO for benchmark enthusiasts, still not really noticeable.
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2201606/cas-latency-speed-ram.html

While i can see you're thinking about upgrading later on while keeping your parts, which is a wise choice to do, unfortunately you're using a dead platform which is the FX series and their mobos, the only decent upgrade path would a be a total switch over to another platform, being it Intel or AMD Ryzen atm. You would spend tons of money on a mobo for a FX 9XXX that would still be pretty slow compared to a newer Intel i5 let alone a Ryzen 1600x...

So, for a good advice, save up a bit, try to sell your current parts for a moderate amount and use that cash to start anew with a future proofed rig and all the benefits that newer tech will provide you. Or if you're really set on sticking to FX a 8320 and 16GB should last you a while still, but it won't do miracles... sadly.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

At what speeds and CAS? At some point in the future I will upgrade to a better Mobo and want it to be able to use higher speeds then as well as work with what I do now.

See my previous post .... frankly, I would not invest in new new RAM for this MoBo unless you pick up a real bargain for used memory... the MoBos RAM support includes only the lower speed spectrum rather slow and DDR3 is not usable on any current platform so bringing it to an upgrade is not gonna happen. More importantly, speed is limited by what your board supports.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

RAM amount, RAM speed or CAS may not be noticeable depending on what you test with, how you test and what games you use for testing

Folks have argued for years that RAM speed and CAS don't matter. ... when reviewers take the time to investigate more than 3 or 4 games under various scenarios, we see differently. The last for example shows that in one game, there's is 0% performance advantage with 2400 over 1600 ... in the other game it's 11%/. So folks are able to confirm their preconceived notions just by picking what games they use to test with. Many factors come into play, the most obvious of which is bottlenecking. If your fps is limited by GPG or CPU, than any improvement in RAM will go unnoticed. Add a 2nd GFX card, or upgrade the CPU and this may change. Games known to be limited by RAM (amount, speed or CAS) include the STALKER series, F1, GTAV, Witcher 3 and a few others

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2792/12

22.3 % (SLI) increase in minimum frame rates w/ C6 instead of C8 in Far Cry 2
18% (single card) / 5% (SLI) increase in minimum frame rates w/ C6 instead of C8 in Dawn of War
15% (single card) / 5% (SLI) increase in minimum frame rates w/ C6 instead of C8 in World in Conflict

Also see http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/memory/2011/01/11/the-best-memory-for-sandy-bridge/1

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell/10
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/memory-performance-16gb-ddr31333-to-ddr32400-on-ivy-bridge-igp-with-gskill/14

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?166512-Arma-3-CPU-vs-RAM-performance-comparison-1600-2133-up-to-15-FPS-gain

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/32-gb-ddr3-ram,3790-10.html