How much DDR3 for sandy bridge?

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wongnog

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Looking into building a Sandy Bridge system with an i7-2600K and Asus P8P67 Pro board. My main uses are video encoding, I don't play any PC games. How much DDR3 should I be looking at and what speeds do I need if I want to overclock? I'm definitely on a budget so I'm looking for a "best bang for buck" situation. Thanks guys!
 
Thanks Flopper. Can you explain to me what 1600 mhz means for the memory, since from my understanding you can't overclock the base clock on SB systems. Will the DDR3 memory actually run at 1600 Mhz or only under certain conditions?

I'm also uncertain now if I should be getting a P67 board to OC my system, or use H67 to utilize the QuickSynch features of the on die GPU. I hear that has tremendous benefits to video editing but I'm disturbed that H67 mobos cripple your OC ability.
 
wongnog said:
Thanks Flopper. Can you explain to me what 1600 mhz means for the memory, since from my understanding you can't overclock the base clock on SB systems. Will the DDR3 memory actually run at 1600 Mhz or only under certain conditions?

I'm also uncertain now if I should be getting a P67 board to OC my system, or use H67 to utilize the QuickSynch features of the on die GPU. I hear that has tremendous benefits to video editing but I'm disturbed that H67 mobos cripple your OC ability.
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Same goes for me...also interested in how memory speeds will effect overclocking on the newest platform.
 
wongnog said:
Thanks Flopper. Can you explain to me what 1600 mhz means for the memory, since from my understanding you can't overclock the base clock on SB systems. Will the DDR3 memory actually run at 1600 Mhz or only under certain conditions?

I'm also uncertain now if I should be getting a P67 board to OC my system, or use H67 to utilize the QuickSynch features of the on die GPU. I hear that has tremendous benefits to video editing but I'm disturbed that H67 mobos cripple your OC ability.
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RAM is run independently of BLCK now. Personally I'm pretty puzzled at that decision, b/c for most people (even OCers) it idevalues the importance of expensive RAM. I suppose Sandra and other synthetic benches would show gains, but for now, I would spend extra cash on an SSD instead of a lower latency/higher clocked RAM.

I'm watching the windwithme thread to see if he'll re-run his benches with different RAM speeds, since someone already requested it.
 
Some food for thought:

Almost all games currently released are 32-bit and are NOT large address aware. That means the game will never be able to use more than 2GB on it's own under any circumstances.

Even if a 32-bit game is large address aware, it's still going to be limited to either 3gb or 4gb max depending on other variables.

Only an actual 64-bit game would ever be able to use more than 4gb.

So beyond 4gb you're only really going to benefit from superfetch when adding more ram. In almost all cases you would be better off with a smaller amount of faster ram as opposed to a larger amount of slower ram.
 
Mav451 said:
Personally I'm pretty puzzled at that decision, b/c for most people (even OCers) it idevalues the importance of expensive RAM.
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What does Intel have to gain by having their customers buy more expensive RAM?
 
Mav451 said:
RAM is run independently of BLCK now. Personally I'm pretty puzzled at that decision, b/c for most people (even OCers) it idevalues the importance of expensive RAM.
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GotNoRice said:
In almost all cases you would be better off with a smaller amount of faster ram as opposed to a larger amount of slower ram.
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Which is it? Anyone know?
 
GotNoRice said:
Some food for thought:

Almost all games currently released are 32-bit and are NOT large address aware. That means the game will never be able to use more than 2GB on it's own under any circumstances.

Even if a 32-bit game is large address aware, it's still going to be limited to either 3gb or 4gb max depending on other variables.

Only an actual 64-bit game would ever be able to use more than 4gb.

So beyond 4gb you're only really going to benefit from superfetch when adding more ram. In almost all cases you would be better off with a smaller amount of faster ram as opposed to a larger amount of slower ram.
Click to expand...



Yeah and with SSD's becoming the norm now (had one for a year+ myself), superfetch should be disabled.
 
It's my understanding that Windows 7 automatically disables superfetch if it detects an SSD with fast read/write speeds.
 
No it automatically disables disk defragging. If you have the later intel toolbox you will see it has a tune button which disables superfetch. It checks your system. I had my super fetch disabled via services already though.
 
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As far as I know (not a lot!) video encoding uses a lot of RAM. Personally I'd feel a bit claustrophobic with "only" 4 GB. Sadly with dual-channel RAM the only step up is to 8, which will certainly be enough at least. I like 6 GB as a happy medium on X58.
 
Running a 64-bit Win7 OS and a new SB system I would suggest 8GB of RAM. That will allow you to do anything you want to in the realm of normal desktop multitasking. A lot of times, I do not even shut down games, just alt-tab out and get on with my work to go back to those later. One of the great things I have found about Win 7 in the last year is that with enough RAM you do not have to ever exit any program.
 
That's the reason kyle i'm going up to 12GB's of ram shortly, and that fact that I run a ramdisc also.
 
12GB would allow you to have a healthy RAMDisk. I have been running 12GB in my personal machine now for a good while and running content creation software along with 20 other programs on the desktop I have only seen it get into the 9GB+ of RAM utilized once or twice. It is not uncommon for my desktop workload to stay in the 5GB range though. Hence, 4GB is surely not enough for modern day multitasking. If you shut down all programs after usage though, then 4GB will likely to you fine on a 64-bit system unless you are running some content creation programs that would load that. And if you are doing that, then likely you already know it.
 
12GB allows me to have a lot of junk open and Windows is happy using the rest as a cache.
 
gizmo said:
Which is it? Anyone know?
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I'm pretty sure he meant it devalues the importance of expensive ram in terms of being able to achieve a certain BLCK. Faster ram would still benefit from being faster just the same.
 
ShuttleLuv said:
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Yeah and with SSD's becoming the norm now (had one for a year+ myself), superfetch should be disabled.
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I've always wondered why that is - main RAM is still faster than even the fastest SSD, so why not put that extra RAM to use doing something...useful?
 
The more I read about things, I think I might have to wait for mid-2011 to upgrade so I can see what the Z68 platform has to offer. I want to OC like with P67 but want to make use of the on die GPU like the H67. I can't believe Intel is not offering both solutions right off the bat. If I only played games and wanted to OC, I'd go with P67. But I don't play games, only video encoding so I would want both OC and on die GPU
 
Forceman said:
I've always wondered why that is - main RAM is still faster than even the fastest SSD, so why not put that extra RAM to use doing something...useful?
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For reals. Over 10GB/s >> even the fastest SSDs in RAID0. Superfetch in Vista was annoying, but it's not in Win 7.
 
I'll be using 16GB. What to use that much for however is the question.. if I upgrade to 2011 with ivy bridge i"ll just reuse the ram and it will then be useful for quad channel since it's all identical stuff. Maybe put the pagefile on a ramdrive that's 2GB in size and be done with having a pagefile on disk at all.. don't care about crash recovery or error logs, system never crashes.
 
Hey its not me, I have no problem with superfetch. But intel's toolbox definitely wants you to disable it.
 
GotNoRice said:
Some food for thought:

Almost all games currently released are 32-bit and are NOT large address aware. That means the game will never be able to use more than 2GB on it's own under any circumstances.

Even if a 32-bit game is large address aware, it's still going to be limited to either 3gb or 4gb max depending on other variables.

Only an actual 64-bit game would ever be able to use more than 4gb.

So beyond 4gb you're only really going to benefit from superfetch when adding more ram. In almost all cases you would be better off with a smaller amount of faster ram as opposed to a larger amount of slower ram.
Click to expand...

Except there are several dozen other processes running on your typical PC that need ram. I can EASILY push usage above 4GB when gaming.
 
avatar[djedi];1036670701 said:
And this board can take up to 32GB of memory:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4080/welcome-to-sandy-bridge-with-the-asrock-p67-extreme4/3
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But does anyone make 8GB desktop (DDR3 unbuffered non-ECC) modules yet? Afaict intel desktop processors won't work with server memory (DDR3 registered ECC) and if they do what is the price on them like?

Sadly with dual-channel RAM the only step up is to 8, which will certainly be enough at least. I like 6 GB as a happy medium on X58.
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If you really want 6GB balanced dual channel you can get it by using 2x2+2x1. Not that I would recommend such a setup. I'd get 2x4GB for a sandy bridge setup on the grounds that I always seem to want more memory eventually and I hate to throw modules away.
 
8 is the new 4, unless you are on a strict budget or won't be using a 64 bit OS. It's not like most things need more than 4, it's just so darn cheap...
 
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Soon as 4GB DIMMs come down more in price, i'll upgrade from 12GB to 24GB. I should be able to carry the memory over to IB.
 
That article was written well before SSD's landed. Windows 7 and SSD's need superfetch disabled.
 
ShuttleLuv said:
That article was written well before SSD's landed. Windows 7 and SSD's need superfetch disabled.
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Yes, that's the official word from MS and also the default for Windows 7 with a fast enough SSD installed:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.
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If Win 7 leaves those on, it's because the SSD isn't fast enough. So it's a little more complex than always disabling SuperFetch and prefetching if you have a SSD.
 
pxc said:
Yes, that's the official word from MS and also the default for Windows 7 with a fast enough SSD installed:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

If Win 7 leaves those on, it's because the SSD isn't fast enough. So it's a little more complex than always disabling SuperFetch and prefetching if you have a SSD.
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Still doesn't make sense though, if free RAM is not being used for Superfetch then it is just being wasted.
 
I had 4GB of DDR2 and got 4GB of DDR3 for SB. If by some fluke 4GB isn't enough I can get more but it's been plenty for years now.
 
Forceman said:
Still doesn't make sense though, if free RAM is not being used for Superfetch then it is just being wasted.
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I understand your point and I would probably reenable those features if I had a SSD and lots of memory. But there are diminishing returns when the random access penalty is close to zero and transfer throughput is several times higher than a HDD (very fast in sequential R/W, but much slower in random I/O).
 
Uh an X25-M is no slouch and intel makes it, so they're saying to disable it...they have more clout with microsoft than anyone, and their toolbox won't let you do anything until it's disabled now.
 
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