RAM: 4GB of 667MHz vs 4GB of 800MHz?

[Brody McKee]

I currently have 2GB of 667MHz RAM in my machine (my processor runs a 1066FSB):

- Would I be best to up it to 800MHz and add 2GB? or

- Should I just add the 2GB of 667MHz?

Money is always an issue lol, so I don't want to spend extra dollars if I wont see and performance difference worth the money I spend. Thanks!

(And yes, I'm running Vista x64 so I can use more than 3.5GB of RAM.)

[Vice]

800MHz is good but 667 is ok. You probably wouldn't notice the difference unless you constantly monitor your frames per second in your games or sit there like a hawk ticking down the seconds until your movies transcode.

For a long time I ran 4GB of 1,200MHz RAM but my RAM eventually died from over-volting. Then I purchased 4x800MHz and I seriously couldn't tell a performance difference. My score is lower in Benchmarks but in real world usage I didn't notice anything.

[ccuk]

800MHz is good but 667 is ok. You probably wouldn't notice the difference unless you constantly monitor your frames per second in your games or sit there like a hawk ticking down the seconds until your movies transcode.

For a long time I ran 4GB of 1,200MHz RAM but my RAM eventually died from over-volting. Then I purchased 4x800MHz and I seriously couldn't tell a performance difference. My score is lower in Benchmarks but in real world usage I didn't notice anything.

QFT (Y)

[Leddy]

If you buy fast RAM you're basically paying for overclocking headroom. The difference between 667MHz and 800MHz is quite marginal and basically for 800MHz you get to up the FSB a bit more than you otherwise would with a 667MHz chip.

[TEX4S]

there really isnt any advantage to going above 2 Gig to justify the cost...

Its like OC-ing (law of diminishing returns) the higher up you go ...@ a certain point your improvement is less and less. There are plenty of studies and comparisons showing that there really isnt a good enough improvement to justify the cost of going higher than 2 Gb

[omganinja]

Are you buying 2GB of 800mhz to add to the 2GB of 667mhz or buying 4GB of 800mhz? If you're adding the 800mhz to the 667mhz then there no point getting 800mhz as it will only run at 667mhz.

The noticable difference will come from having twice as much ram, not from having slightly faster ram.

[Vice]

there really isnt any advantage to going above 2 Gig to justify the cost...

Its like OC-ing (law of diminishing returns) the higher up you go ...@ a certain point your improvement is less and less. There are plenty of studies and comparisons showing that there really isnt a good enough improvement to justify the cost of going higher than 2 Gb

It really depends what your doing with your PC. For instance running Crysis sucks up 1.4GB of my RAM. I have enough to let it breath and I get excellent performance. If I had 2GB part of that game would be getting stuck in page files and diminish performance.

I also noticed less lag when playing Garrys Mod, A source based mod for HL2. When playing levels with thousands of models spawned it easily ate over a gig of memory and I had sever lag playing that with 2GB of RAM on Vista, but when I upgraded to 4GB, the Lag was completely gone.

I'm just talking games here which are relevant to the original poster I believe? But there are also many other application benefits, video editing, photoshop etc if your doing a lot of demanding tasks it really can't hurt to beef up your memory capacity. SuperFetch also makes good use of idle ram by pre-caching applications you frequently use.

[Brody McKee]

So it's 2 more GB then. Thanks heaps everyone ;)