How do you choose the right memory?

[danb4026]

My MSI P67A-GD65 MB states that it: Supports four unbuffered DIMM of 1.5 Volt DDR3 1066/1333/1600*/2133*(OC) DRAM, 32GB Max

 

What are the reasons for choosing 1333, 1600, 2133 etc?

 

Thanks

[Slinger]

For everyday users, you really can not tell the speed between any of those except maybe 1066 being a bit slow. I would recommend to at least get 1333.

I personally have 12gigs of 1600mhz G SKill Pis. I overclock my PC so the higher speeds give me room to overclock.

[danb4026]

Agh, got it. So it has nothing to do with compatibility.

What about the "10666" etc?

[AJLynn]

I looked at a bunch of tests on this, and the results were always a bit odd. In artificial benchmarks designed to test just the speed of the memory, on P67 boards, higher rated memory does better. BUT in "real world" benchmarks in games, rendering software, video encoding, Photoshop type stuff - nothing. No difference in system performance outside the margin of error by using higher spec RAM. The only differences anybody was able to find were in tests that ran many resource intensive programs at once (the higher spec ram did better) and in gaming, ram with lower CL numbers did a bit better in FPS. (But low CL number 1333 ram did better than high CL number 2133 RAM - it was not the MHz of the ram that had an effect.)

 

Somebody who's got more experience with Sandy Bridge hardware might correct me, but my interpretation has been that because Sandy Bridge has its front side bus more or less locked (it can't be overclocked by more than a few percent) and CPU clock adjustment is done by adjusting the CPU multiplier, faster RAM doesn't actually do anything on a P67 board. If you can find tasks that are heavy on just transferring stuff around on the memory controller side but don't involve the CPU - there is very little that you'd actually do that is like this - faster ram is better, but it bottlenecks at the FSB and doesn't translate to actual performance in use.

 

So I wouldn't buy the fast stuff that costs a lot more, but usually you see 1333 and 1600 ram for around the same prices so I'd just pick up whatever you see a good price on.