2 GB fast ram or 4GB slower ram?

R

Righty

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 18, 2007
Messages
480
Im getting ready to build a mid range rig from used stuff sold here on HF over a couple months. Its on a major budget.

Im prolly going to do a P35, E8400, or q6600 and a GTX 260 or 9800.

Its mainly going to be used for games. But the question is 4gb of slower ram or 2gb fast ram? 50-60 is my ram budget.
 
Depends on how much you need and what you'll be doing on the system.

Do you ever use more than 2GB of ram at a time? If so, then go with 4GB. If not, then the extra space will be wasted, and you might as well get the faster RAM.

All depends on your personal computing style.
 
Gaming and browsing is about it. I dont care about crysis to much, played it on my last rig.

LOTRO
BF2
Quake live (a good pc does smooth it out alot)
UT3

Nothing to heavy but if i can do the 2gb and get back and forth between web pages faster that would be good.

One more question? Can i buy two different brands of ram as long as the speeds are the same? I might just buy to 2gb of good fast ram now and pick some more up later. But picking up the same brand will be hard to do used.
 
On an intel system where even if you OC your RAM is going to be limited by your FSB, you should be able to get 4GB of DDR2-800 to have plenty of OC headroom for $45. I put 4GB of this stuff into my (relatively new) Phenom II system and it's been rock solid while I play around with OC'ing.

That should get you plenty of OC headroom on any of the CPUs you're considering.
 
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Thanks guys, 4gb it is. Just wanted to check, ram is never one of those things i thought about when building a rig.
 
yup, agree with everyone else here. With ram prices these days, there is no reason to go with less than 4gb. Even if you don't use it all, when you eventually do need it you'll be glad it's there :)
 
4GBs will be faster overall, as modern OSes cache things you frequently use. Having the browser load in 1 second instead of 5 is going to be a lot more noticeable than a 10 nanosecond decrease in displaying pages from a faster, smaller kit.
 
In gaming the difference between the fastest ram and the slowest is something like 5%, in CPU limited situations. In GPU bound situations it's 0.

Only reason to get high speed RAM is to allow faster FSBs but even DDR2-800 lets you go to at least 400 FSB which is 3.6 GHz for a Q6600 or E8400...
 
I came back to this site because i was shopping for laptops. The laptops all mostly have 4gb, and alot of them come with vista 64...but now i look at my desktop and it has just 2gb memory.

Anyway, getting to the question, will i notice internet browser load differences, boot time, or anything else related to everyday tasks, having 4gb instead of 2gb memory and running on windows XP?
 
Application load times should be instant if you use a modern OS like Vista or 7.

It all depends on how much you do at your machine at one time.

Then again, 4GB is the absolute minimum most of us here would ever consider having in out main machines.
 
4GB use to be more than enough but now in days its really required. If 6-12 would be good for some buffer room.
 
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