Bocephus666 wrote:Any thoughts on memory? I'm shooting for 32GB off the bat, with an upgrade in 6 months or so to 64GB. Really want to try a RAMDrive. As for the memory, i just grabbed a part number off of Asus's QVL list. I've seen in several of your other post over at dual-boxing.com about not paying the premium for faster RAM.
All that being said, I assume you just moved the Dominator memory you purchased for the EVGA board over to your new board? Have you had any issues?
Yeah, I just moved my existing memory over and learned a lesson in the process...
DDR3-1866 is supported as a stock speed. However, it is only supported with one DIMM per channel. If all slots are populated, then the maximum supported memory speed is DDR3-1600. Both situations are likely subject to memory timing, too. Intel usually makes this information available in their white papers.
SourceI have no
Intel source on that mostly because I'm too lazy to look through their white papers, but I'll go ahead and trust what Asus is telling its customers about its motherboard and the current-gen CPUs. I found out the lesson the hard way and Windows only ends up BSOD'ing when running the memory at 1866MHz in the RIVBE. A bump in BCLK lets me run the memory at 1730MHz, so I sit halfway between 1600 and 1866 and I'm fine with that because my
RAMDrive is just as fast, if not faster, than it was before (an OC'd CPU tends to help with this as well).
This is really a good example of why it's not really necessary to buy that super-awesome-lightning-speed RAM when it's not really supported and ultimately gives close to 0 boost in performance for the cost. I was almost regretting not grabbing the same memory, but at 2100MHz instead -- Now I'm glad I didn't.
They also recommend (in the same link) that you should buy a single memory kit rather than two different ones. I've heard mixed results on this, but I've honestly never listened to it and I purchased 2x32GB kits when I put the original build together (I don't remember why). Could it have come back and bitten me? Sure, but I think they tell people that to try and dissuade people from buying a second kit later down the line that isn't identical to the original. I'd like to think that top-tier RAM falls victim to the mix-and-match problems much less often than the cheaper stuff, but who knows.
To add to that (for anyone else who reads this), I'm going to assume that the more kits you "piece together" to make the capacity you want, the more likely you're going to run into issues. So...
Buying 1x64GB kit should lead to no issues with the memory being matched up because it's tested together all at once
Buying 2x32GB kits
shouldn't lead to any issues, but might because it wasn't tested together
Buying 4x16GB kits may lead to issues because the kits weren't tested together (again)
Buying 8x8GB kits is kind of retarded and will probably have the highest chance to have problems
Hopefully this answers some questions, but as for a RAMDrive,
these are my current thoughts on using one until further notice.