ddr3 ram

[hawka]

I am upgrading my system to asus crosshair v formular MB to use with my black edition 4 core 965, what I want to know is would there be any advantage by getting 16gb ram or just get 8 gb ram, and is 888824 ram worth getting instead of 999924 ram.I have saphire 6870 graphics.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

[FieroCDSP]

If I'm building a rig from scratch, I try to get whatever my budget will allow, only adjust for whether a later upgrade might be cheaper later than currently. the newer OS make full use of all the ram, but I'm personally still on XP32 so a small portion of my total ram is not in use. In such an instance, the total ram is not as important as the clock speed. If your GFX card is rated highly in its ram and speed, then you can skimp just a bit on the system ram. The Saphire's 1GB of DDR5 is pretty good. I'm running an equivalent NVidia card and I can nearly max out the video with my older Core2Quad 2.8, but it takes a hit when heavily populated with MLRS rockets or when using multiple screens.

The best thing you can do is double-check to make sure your ram's model numbers are supported by the board specifically (usually in the manual or on the manufacturer's site), and then buy the best you can afford. It doesn't pay to spend the extra dime on the better ram but then have stability or processing lags from an untested or incompatible set.