How to Rate the difrent RAM's sticks in the market?

[gsilbers]

Im going to upgrade ram from some generics i feel are slow. but i really dont know if the generics are good or bad. i see difrent webstores that have difrent rams w/ the same specs. 1st impression is to buy the cheapest for the highest ram but i heard difrent ram sticks, although the same 2gig ram sticks, have difrent speeds and work better or worst. but i dont wanna buy expensive ram just cause its expensive thinkin itll be bettter when is not.

I want a lot of ram for my gigastudio. and hopefully ill get giga4 on vista 64bit thus, higher ram is better to loading more samples.

i have a quad core 2.4 wth asus mobo that can hold up to 8gigs of ram.

[pjplayer]

Originally Posted by gsilbers

Im going to upgrade ram from some generics i feel are slow. but i really dont know if the generics are good or bad. i see difrent webstores that have difrent rams w/ the same specs. 1st impression is to buy the cheapest for the highest ram but i heard difrent ram sticks, although the same 2gig ram sticks, have difrent speeds and work better or worst. but i dont wanna buy expensive ram just cause its expensive thinkin itll be bettter when is not.

I want a lot of ram for my gigastudio. and hopefully ill get giga4 on vista 64bit thus, higher ram is better to loading more samples.

i have a quad core 2.4 wth asus mobo that can hold up to 8gigs of ram.

if you really are at the point where you think RAM speed will be an issue then there are loads of things to consider. i think you'd be best off going to tom's hardware or somewhere more focused on technical pc issues.

edit: oh dear, you've got over 2000 posts and i was being condescending.

[wavemakersdj]

It's sad, but i would be willing to bet that trying to run gigastudio 4 on vista 64 bit with 4 gigs of ram will be slower than xp 32 bit with 3 gigs of ram. Vista's drive access coding is very very poor and even with a large amount of ram it's not gonna make much a difference. You could put 32 gigs of ram in the system and it's not make make that much of a difference working in the program because it's gonna be slower at accessing the files on the hard drive. Sure you'll be able to run more loops and effects at once in the ram, but when it tried to feed that through the operating system and then to the processor it's not gonna make that much of a difference. I hope I am wrong, but my experience with anything inside vista, no matter what the hardware, has been terrible.

[allencollins]

'Generic' can sometimes be very good. There are under 10 companies in the world that actually make pc ram (mac's included).

The generic brands are made by big name companies like Hynix, elpida + infineon. Even Kingston buy some of there memory from the big Asian foundries like Elpida. So if you are careful you can score on generic ram. I always thought Micron made the best ram. If you buy their computers
you really notice a difference in speed from the ram/motherboard combo. Apple at one time used all Micron Ram. They are the only maker of ram in the US besides Kingston. But again Kingston buys some of there ram from big Asian foundries.

But to be honest Ram is so tightly integrated with the motherboard and CPU's these days the performance differences are subtle. There is a difference but who knows exactly how much. That would be one hair splitting speed test to conduct. If you can look at 'brand name' ram and look for serial#'s you can try to match up with generic brands. I noticed a while back Buffalo ram was just repackaged brand name memory but half the price.

But then again who knows maybe it's the big name 'b' stock. But I doubt it.

[Joe Porto]

You want RAM with low CAS and RAS timing capability. Most online dealers list these specs for each model. You also want RAM that will handle the speed of your motherboard's FSB. You can see these settings if you look in your BIOS. Also, there are utilities that will list these settings from a program running in Windows.

Although RAM has a small chip that tells the motherboard what specs to set, sometimes this setting is not optimal for the RAM. You can defeat this auto feature in the MB BIOS and set it manually to the fastest speed the RAM is spec'd to.

[LewisWu]

not all ram plays nicely.. i've dealt with issues resulting from cheaper high density ram.. what boggles my mind is how the faster ddr2 sticks are cheaper than the slower ddr2 sticks.

[gsilbers]

Originally Posted by wavemakersdj

It's sad, but i would be willing to bet that trying to run gigastudio 4 on vista 64 bit with 4 gigs of ram will be slower than xp 32 bit with 3 gigs of ram. Vista's drive access coding is very very poor and even with a large amount of ram it's not gonna make much a difference. You could put 32 gigs of ram in the system and it's not make make that much of a difference working in the program because it's gonna be slower at accessing the files on the hard drive. Sure you'll be able to run more loops and effects at once in the ram, but when it tried to feed that through the operating system and then to the processor it's not gonna make that much of a difference. I hope I am wrong, but my experience with anything inside vista, no matter what the hardware, has been terrible.

i hope thats not true . that why im waiting to see posts of others that have upgraded to gigastudio 4... if and when it comes out.

do u think w/ xp64 bit will be better than vista 64bit?

[gsilbers]

Originally Posted by Joe Porto

You want RAM with low CAS and RAS timing capability. Most online dealers list these specs for each model. You also want RAM that will handle the speed of your motherboard's FSB. You can see these settings if you look in your BIOS. Also, there are utilities that will list these settings from a program running in Windows.

Although RAM has a small chip that tells the motherboard what specs to set, sometimes this setting is not optimal for the RAM. You can defeat this auto feature in the MB BIOS and set it manually to the fastest speed the RAM is spec'd to.

good to know thnx

[gsilbers]

Originally Posted by pjplayer

if you really are at the point where you think RAM speed will be an issue then there are loads of things to consider. i think you'd be best off going to tom's hardware or somewhere more focused on technical pc issues.

edit: oh dear, you've got over 2000 posts and i was being condescending.

thats ok. my world is pro studios w macs. thus, im a newbie w/ pc stuff.

[wavemakersdj]

Originally Posted by gsilbers

i hope thats not true . that why im waiting to see posts of others that have upgraded to gigastudio 4... if and when it comes out.

do u think w/ xp64 bit will be better than vista 64bit?

In terms of drivers running I would say it's a good possibility that xp64 might run a little better but without testing both there would be no way to know for sure. I do know that most programs written now aren't going to take advantage of a system with 8 gigs of ram, especially using vista 64 as they weren't written for these programs. If you put 4 gigs of ddr2 ram in the system, you should be able to get the maximum potential for now using either vista or xp (however xp might not see 100% of all that memory.

If it was me doing it, I would stick with xp for another year or two till vista is replaced. MS is already talking about doing so, and their new specs for windows 7 are much better than the hacked together attempt to move forward that vista is.

[gsilbers]

well i defenitly need more than 4 gigs. way more. maybe ill wait to see how people who bought gigastudio 4 which states that it can use up to 128 gigs of ram! and vista.
i looking to see like you say that the upgrade to vista and some more ram wont do that much or all the contrary, and the combo rocks.

if not the other way would be to get more than one computer which i dont wanna do.

[allencollins]

Originally Posted by LewisWu

not all ram plays nicely.. i've dealt with issues resulting from cheaper high density ram.. what boggles my mind is how the faster ddr2 sticks are cheaper than the slower ddr2 sticks.

If you know what you are buying you don't need to worry about it.
If you do your homework there are some great values out there.

[wakestyle]

i would suggest the best way would be to go to your mobo's manufacturor homepage, find your motherboard, and usually they have a supported ram list.

This would be the most stable... But I'm going to assume the Corsair is what you'll probably want.. That's what I'm going to get.

As a rule of thumb though, go for the faster rated ram, rather than getting slower (and cheaper) ram. It's way better to have better ram than you actually need, than trying to push slower ram which will result in alot of errors.

[wakestyle]

ps. i'm still not sure on how the 'latency settings' and specs affect overall performance. But I know than smaller seems to result in quicker performance, but at the price of stability, so .... can anyone else advise??