RAM timings and upgrade confusion!

Fightsback

bsod wrote: »

I know nothing about what they do, which is why I asked them, in their thread, about their system. If I needed random speculative answers about what could use some ram up, from unconnected people, I'd would have started my own thread.

Please do.

esuhl

Ilija wrote: »

Hi, I don't know where you'll going to get 6GB of additional ram, unless 3X2GB...

Probably from eBay. There seems to be a fair selection and the secondhand 6GB kits cost about half the price of a new one... and a quarter of the price of a new 12GB kit.

I_have_spoken wrote: »

Windows will use all the memory available for caches etc. You need to look at the number of hard faults/sec to determine if the machine is genuinely running short of RAM.

Ah, right -- thanks. I've been keeping an eye on RAM and pagefile usage (as displayed by various widgets) in Windows 7, and noticed that when it peaked the system slowed down considerably. The slow-downs happen mostly in Windows 7 when I have a large number of media-rich web pages open (I suspect memory leaks in Firefox/Flash), and especially when using multiple VMs.

Unfortunately, Windows 7 became corrupted and so I can only boot into XP and Arch Linux at the moment. Arch performs much faster than Win7, so maybe I should try and recover (or reinstall) Win7 to have a look...

The thing is... it's only about £25 for a 6GB kit -- at that price, I thought it was a no-brainer!

audigex wrote: »

I'd assume that he's got one of the early DDR3 boards...

Yup -- I bought a Core i7 chip on the day they were first released. It uses triple-channel DDR3 RAM.

audigex wrote: »

For the most part, forget the timings - modern chipsets appreciate higher frequency far more than tight timings, and you'll almost certainly not notice the difference in real world practical use. The tighter timing set may give you a little more head room if overclocking heavily, but I doubt you're overclocked that heavily if you're only just considering increasing from 6GB anyway

I built the PC intending to overclock it, but it was so fast and stable that I never bothered. I keep meaning to look into overclocking as it's one of the few things I've never tried.

My current RAM can run at 1333MHz with 7-7-7-20, so maybe I could overclock that set to 1600MHz, and then get a second set of 1600MHz/9-9-9-24 RAM and run that at the default speed...? Is that possible (maybe I should have a look at my BIOS)?

Anyway... since I'm stuck with 1333MHz RAM and the timings don't matter too much, and I don't want to spend too much on an old PC, pretty much any 6GB kit (>=1333MHz) should be fine, right...?