2GB vs 4GB

[Tylantt]

Hey guys, i'm been thinking about 4gb vs 2GB. Is 2gb faster than 4gb if the 2GB is at 2000mhz or is the 4GB better at 1333mhz?

 

[Arn0t]

well it depends on what you are talking about... DDR3 or DDR2, and i believe by looking at the post its DDR3, and the 2GB will be faster, but the 4GB will help with more multitasking and such

 

[Tylantt]

DDr3. Also, What if I put OCZ Gold 4GB of 1600mhz of DDR3 in a XFX 790i Ultra motherboard?

 

[Badger]

are you running vista or XP? if it's XP i'd stick with 2gigs of highend ram. Otherwise you could give it a shot if you wanted to.

 

[Arn0t]

DDr3. Also, What if I put OCZ Gold 4GB of 1600mhz of DDR3 in a XFX 790i Ultra motherboard?

hmm.. i dont understand what you mean by that what if part... i should just run normal, as long as the board can support DDR3 1600

 

[Tylantt]

hmm.. i dont understand what you mean by that what if part... i should just run normal, as long as the board can support DDR3 1600

It supports it O.c, Does that mean I can only run the O.C ram to 1600 and not normal 1600?

 

[Havegooda {A|R}]

What OS?

XP, doesn't matter. DDR3 will pwn it.
Vista, 2GB would be better, UNLESS you're multitasking a lot.

Now, if it were DDR2, I'd say 4GB all the way. I'm on Vista and it runs smooth as butter on 4. Planning on buying another 2x2GB kit in a few days for 8GB.

You can set the speed to anything you want really, just gotta see if it actually works That board supports up to 2000Mhz native.

~Gooda~

 

[Tylantt]

Cool, thanks. It's XP Media Center 32-bit by the way.

 

[Havegooda {A|R}]

Just a word of caution, you won't see the full 4GB if you have a video card. 32-bit only recognizes 4GB MAX RAM. If you have a video card, it subtracts the vRAM from the max 4GB and then recognizes the leftover from your physical RAM.

~Gooda~

 

[/dev/null]

Hey guys, i'm been thinking about 4gb vs 2GB. Is 2gb faster than 4gb if the 2GB is at 2000mhz or is the 4GB better at 1333mhz?

It depends.... 2 sticks can be faster timings than 4 sticks (or two higher capacity sticks), so the system can be over clocked and have better memory IO. 4+ gig RAM timings tend to be slightly slower, but not have need to use the disk as 'virtual' RAM, which is an order of magnitude (or more) slower than RAM.

Want to run a benchmark, 2x1G is the sweet spot. Want to game, listen to music, and have an email and/or chat client running in the background - more RAM the better.

Real world, more RAM will be faster. Win32 processes are limited to 2G each, but you have multiple things running. Even if the OS only recognizes 3.2 out of 4G of physical RAM, you still get a 1-1.5G of extra RAM for the OS and all the other apps to use. You lose big time the moment your system pages out to the hard drive.

Not sure how much DDR3 costs - were it me, I'd rather have 4x2G with slower timings (and a 64-bit OS).