RAM Newegg deal

[Steelbarrage]

50 for 8g of Gskill 1600
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231428

[Bill]

Any mercan's want to help a brotha out here?

[Spooky]

Where do you live, Bill?

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

He lives in England.

[sleepysheep]

Any mercan's want to help a brotha out here?

Check out scan.co.uk

[Spooky]

Or skinflint, but it's indeed more expensive there.

[Come and See]

Not bad.

I paid $100 for 8 GB of 2133 though. 

[=KoS= Eldragon]

Hmm... I got 8 gig now, I could double my current ram for just $50. But the real question is, do I need it?

[Come and See]

Hmm... I got 8 gig now, I could double my current ram for just $50. But the real question is, do I need it?

It doesn't hurt. If you have 8 GB of RAM you can turn off your system paging file and give yourself a little boost in performance.

[Spooky]

Turning off the paging file does not give a boost in performance.

[=KoS= Eldragon]

My paging file never gets accessed as it is. I might buy the ram anyway. I used to do a major ram upgrade about 18 months after the previous MB+RAM purchase.

But these days you wait that long and its hard to find high quality ram for a good price. You're stuck with the cheap crap while the rest of the top-end stuff is at DDRX+1, where X is whatever you have.

[Ralux]

Thing is, even the best current systems simply don't benefit from faster RAM except for a few very specific work cases.

For games anything faster than ddr3-1600 is simply a waste of money. Even if you have 2x gtx580 and a 2600k at 4,5GHz.

I also haven't managed to fill up my current 4gb of RAM in the past 3 years - page file is disabled :>

[Mitchpate]

With modern OS's, removing the pagefile only helps on VMs.  Doing it on a real computer, especially one that's used for gaming, doesn't really benefit you at all.  If Windows doesn't need it, it won't use it.

Also, fast RAM isn't necessarily useful and can sometimes actually make your system slower.  You could put DDR3-4000 in your computer but if the ratio to your CPU is funky as hell your system will crawl.  If you haven't pulled out a calculator and run the math on the base clock you really don't know how optimized your system is.  On my Q6600 build I underclocked the RAM from 800MHz down to 622MHz (for 1:1 with OC'd processor) and saw a noticeable increase in system speed.  Do the math, find out what your system really needs, and then buy it.  It'll often be slower than you think, allowing you to get RAM with a much lower CL.  Alternatively, if you buy high quality "fast" RAM, you can often underclock it and get a better CL out of it as well.

[Freeborn_Toad]

I never recommend disabling the page file completely. If you have lots of memory Windows will rarely touch it, but there are still some programs that expect it to be there, and it's nice to have just in case.

As for memory ratios, in general if you have a CPU with an integrated memory controller, faster memory speed means a faster system (how ever slight the difference may be), because there is no way of synchronizing memory speed to the speed of these memory controllers anyway.

Older platforms were often picky about memory ratios and fsb speeds. Some chipsets, especially the NForce 680 and 790 liked 1:1 or 1:2 FSB:DRAM ratios. Intel chipsets usually had no such limitation, but often times automatic loosening of tRD (the timing that memory "straps" controlled) made higher ratios slower than lower ones. The way around this was to manually reduce tRD and increase northbridge voltage to compensate.

[Bill]

He lives in England.

This information could be considered false.