Hi, I currently have 2 x 2GB DDR2 OCZ ReaperX PC2 6400 with good timings of 4-4-3. I noticed that I could sell these and buy 2 x 4GB DDR3 without spending any money (My motherboard supports up to 1333MHz) Would the upgrade be worth it?
I mainly play games and browse the internet etc...
What is the make and model of your motherboard?
There aren't many motherboards that will take DDR2 and DDR3...
Also what OS are you running? You would have to be using a 64 Bit OS to be able to use anything more than 4Gb (Well more like 3.5Gb)
It's a Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R. I'm on Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit - The board supports having 2 x 4GB DDR3 1333 MHz memory as I've found through searching other forums.
I'm just interested to see if the difference in timings makes a difference to performance or whether the added speed transfer/more memory will be worth while me swapping the RAM.
To put the question better would you have 2 x 2GB DDR2 memory with faster timings or 2 x 4 GB DDR3 memory with slower timings for a gaming system?
Personally I'd go with more Ram.
For example when playing SWTOR yesterday my ram was running at around 3.6Gb on Vista 64 Bit.
Not much headroom if you have 4Gb - but plenty with the 8Gb I've got.
Timings often dont make a mssive difference unless you are overclocking etc
I totally agree increase the capacity timing will give little difference.
Regards
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As others have said, you won't notice the difference in memory speed, but you might notice the difference from having greater capacity: depends on whether you multitask heavily or use any programs that are particular memory hogs. I've not yet found 4GB to be a restriction, but YMMV.
I agree with the others- capacity makes much more difference than latency/ timings. Also DDR3 has higher latency numbers than ddr2 but timing is actually the same due to the other timings and the increased speed at which ddr3 runs.
In short, yes. DDR3 8gb would be better than 4gb DDR2, never used two ram types on one mobo (ddr2+3), DDR2 is pricey so you could sell the DDR2 and it'd pay for the DDR3
Just in case it helps, I have a very similar board to yours, a Gigabyte GA-P35c-DS3R (Intel P35 based with both DDR2 and DDR3 slots).
In this board I have successfully run the following combinations (each on separate occasions):
- 2x2gb Corsair PC5400 DDR2-667
- 2x2gb Crucial PC10600 DDR3-1333
- 2x4gb Crucial Ballistix Sport PC12800 DDR3-1600
Gigabyte's "official" stance on DDR3 with this board on release was that it should only really support 2x2gb of DDR3, a maximum of 4gb. However most people think that this is because 4gb modules simply weren't available back then. Numerous people have clarified with Gigabyte via support/forums and have clarified that 2x4gb ddr3 (8gb total) will in fact work with this board. I'm not sure how different the GA-EP35C-DS3R is to my board, but I suspect the same rules might apply. Might well be worth checking this out though.
Do you have a specific issue with current performance? At a guess an ssd cache for similar (?) money might give you an overall more pleasurable experience compared to more RAM. It's unlikely that 4gb RAM is bottlenecking you anywhere/much unless you do some very memory intensive programs.
Put it this way, from DDR2 4GB to DDR3 8GB you WILL notice it
I went from:
DDR2 333MHZ > DDR3 1333MHZ
Yes my old DDR2 was slower, but loading times for games was reduced by a lot.
4GB won't bottleneck, its fine for most systems, but obviously if you run a lot of programs 8GB is worth it
more you multi task etc the more of a difference you'll notice.
You will only notice the difference in capacity if you do lots of multi tasking. You won't see any speed increase however.
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