RAM And Overclocking

[JBurnett]

Hi

I'm having a system built, and I received a call. I had chosen to have my CPU & GPU overclocked, and I had chosen 32 GB @ 3200 ghz.

It was suggested to me that 16 GB @ 2666 would be better performance-wise.

I trust this company, but I can't understand why. To me, the uninformed, it sounds like the Ferrari Company saying, Oh you don't want this huge V-12 under the hood, a 50cc 2-cycle Briggs & Stratton engine would perform much better in there.

Anyone? Why is bigger not better?

Thank you

 

[glamdringfh]

A few possibilities:

First, depending on the rest of your build the extra RAM speed might not be able to be used. You could bottle-neck somewhere else and it would totally negate the huge potential throughput. Add the extra stress that high OC'ing puts on hardware and it becomes a bad choice.

Second, unless you are doing some seriously large multimedia creation/ rendering, there is very little need to have more than 16GB of RAM, even for enthusiast gamers. Again, any excess RAM not being used will just sit there wasted.

To answer with your analogy, why pay for the extra expense of a huge V-12 if you can only go 30MPH?

Edit: Also, some CPU's don't do well with RAM that is over a certain range. Here's a link to the article on Tom's that explains this with the new skylake CPU:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/skylake-memory-support,30185.html

 

[thently]

It will not be faster but maybe they are saying it is not needed. Although not sure why they would tell you this. There is no consumer app that can use 32 gigs or ram. So not needed really I have 8 and have had no issues cant say I wont do 16 next time around but 32 is in no way needed. One thing they might be talking about is ram timing as it gets faster they have to slow the cas/ras times wait time basically for each command. in some cases the frequency can make up for larger wait time sometimes it cannot. I would call it a wash on what you are showing here but they might have more insight on the exact ram modules that changes this.

Thent

 

[JBurnett]

A few possibilities:

First, depending on the rest of your build the extra RAM speed might not be able to be used. You could bottle-neck somewhere else and it would totally negate the huge potential throughput. Add the extra stress that high OC'ing puts on hardware and it becomes a bad choice.

Second, unless you are doing some seriously large multimedia creation/ rendering, there is very little need to have more than 16GB of RAM, even for enthusiast gamers. Again, any excess RAM not being used will just sit there wasted.

To answer with your analogy, why pay for the extra expense of a huge V-12 if you can only go 30MPH?

Edit: Also, some CPU's don't do well with RAM that is over a certain range. Here's a link to the article on Tom's that explains this with the new skylake CPU:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/skylake-memory-support,30185.html

Ah. Thank you. I didn't realize all that.

 

[JBurnett]

Although not sure why they would tell you this.

They mentioned something about interfering with the card & CPU overclocking they were doing. Thank you too for answering- very helpful!