[CAT] Scratching Post

I'm getting ready to buy 2 more gigs off of ebay. Does it really make a difference if it's a fancy brand like Corsair or G.skill or any fancy shit that seems to go for twice as much as the unnamed sticks? I'm wondering if it's really worth the trouble...

You usually get what you pay for. Memory is pretty cheap, what not just get a couple of new sticks.

When you're looking to buy ram as an upgrade it's usually time to sit back and have a good hard look at whether or not it's time to cut your losses and save the coin for a new rig. Honestly, Choda you've been in here looking at new hard drives, motherboards now ram. It might be time to let the thing go. Turn it into a file server for the home or something. I've already made the realization and decided to start saving up for a new rig in the next year or so...and my current one is only a year old...Starting to look at upgrades that I can bring over to the new system. For some reason I really want to play with either SSD's or Velociraptor's in a RAID 0 setup. I'm watching a pair of 150gig raptors on ebay right now.

On a related note I've got an old Pentium 4 with a hard drive that just failed. First computer I built myself. It is really tough to let the thing go.

Yeah, maybe you're right... I don't know. The thing is that right now I'm happy with what I got, I really don't need the latest stuff and everything. Throw in a little bit more ram, a motherboard that's stable, and I'm happy. That's all I really need: a stable motherboard, because my issue with mine is that it's not. Power-wise, I don't need more and I have everything I need. I mean, how much would a new rig cost me - ballpark? If I need to replace not only the motherboard, but also the cpu and buy a whole new kind of ram so I can't even us what I have... I mean, it's not really that I'm cheap (although...), it's just that I don't know if it's worth it. In fact I don't think it is... that's why I was asking: what would a $100 couple of sticks of ram give me that a $50 set would not? Reliability? Speed? Would I even notice the difference if it was just speed?

KennysRevenge wrote:You usually get what you pay for. Memory is pretty cheap, what not just get a couple of new sticks.

That's what I'm doing by the way, I'm looking at new sticks. But I notice that the price varies by a factor of 2 between basic, un-branded sticks and the OCZ, G.skill, etc... I'm just wondering if it's worth it basically. Like, if I put a stick in your PC, let you use it for a while, then replaced it for one that cost half as much, do you think that you would notice a difference?

It's an excellent question, really. Trust me.

i've been putting patriot memory in the last couple PCs i've built (including mine when i did a small upgrade about a year or so ago) and it is pretty solid stuff. Not as expensive as the high end shit, but runs like a charm. did have to RMA a pair with newegg, but it was smooth as usual cause they rock.

I've heard bad things about OCZ. I'm running Mushkin in mine and been pretty good.

How much you have for Windows 7? I'm guessing 4 gigs at least?

I've got 6 gigs. 2 gigs of OCZ Platinum and 4 gigs of G Skill. I've had zero problems with either of them, aside from some stupid default settings in the OCZ RAM that was easily fixed. I've never bought an el-cheapo brand of memory, so I wouldn't honestly know if it matched up to better brands or if it was a noticeable difference.
Eww... Just checked NewEgg, and it seems that the cost of memory has gone up a bit in the last couple of months. Hmmm....you might want to wait and see if it goes back down after Christmas.

I've got 8 gigs of Mushkin...a bit overkill but it was dirt cheap as it was on sale and it had a mail in rebate (which I forgot to do...) anyways figured I'd take the opportunity to fill all the slots with same type by the same maker. Apparently Windows 7 is less ram hungry than Vista...I haven't installed 7 yet. Waiting to figure out what to do about hard drives...pick up a Velociraptor...or go for volume...or just do a clean install over this drive.

Kenny are you running DDR 3?

I'm running 4 of Corsair.

Just got 2 sticks of OCZ, which will make it 4 gigs total... sweet!

Well, except that this particular motherboard appears to be very tricky about accepting 4 sticks. So it won't boot with all 4. But it's OK with 3. And acts VERY weird if I remove one of the old sticks (can't boot windows anymore, WTF??)...

Can't wait to get a new one...

Now I got 3 sticks, single channel mode. Is single channel mode a ton worse than dual channel? Am I better off with 2 gigs of dual channel or 3 gigs of single channel?