3XS two years old - what memory to upgrade?

[Skyline]

My 3XS system is just over two years old and now that I've moved it from XP to Wndows 7 64 bit I'd like to take advantage of the extra memory capacity and expand it from the present 3GB to 8GB. What's the recommended make and type please?

[AlphaVictor]

Unless you do a lot of video or photo editing, anything over 4GB is largely unnecessary, and will make negligible to no difference to gaming/document work etc. On the other hand, getting 8GB of RAM is still fairly cheap.
If you have a motherboard that can handle DDR3 memory, then I recommend going for 4GB (or 8GB if you so wish) of 1333MHz or 1600MHz RAM, as faster speeds don't tend to make much of a difference and are unsupported by a large number of motherboards.
I stand by Corsair memory and have used it for years, and do recommend the Vengeance series which are fairly cheap and have a decent head spreader.

Edit: If you don't know what type of memory you need, then if you tell me your current specs (especially motherboard) I can tell you.

[Skyline]

Thanks AlphaVictor.
It's an audio PC for a home recording studio so lots of memory helps.
The motherboard is an Intel Extreme DX58SO. Memory on my invoice says 'triple 3GB 3x1 TR3X3G1333C9'. Processor: Intel Core i7940 2.93GB. Hard disks: 2x750GB Samsung SATA2, 1x250GB Seagate SATA.

Thanks.

[PeteG@Scan]

Hi,

The Intel based models were the first i7 audio boxes we did and the one restriction they did have was a low number of memory slots. It's a tripple channel design board so the native solution would be to swap the sticks out for 3 X 2 or 3 X 4 solutions which would be either http://www.scan.co.uk/products/6gb-%...-9-9-9-24-165v or http://www.scan.co.uk/products/12gb-...s-9-9-9-24-15v

The is however a 4th slot on there which was always considered frankly bizzare by anyone working with them here as it would revert the board back to dual channel as part of some backwards compability move. 2 packs of http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-c...-9-24-xmp-165v would allow you to do that and would be the cheaper option anyhow I think althrough the would be a small performance decrease in real terms the benifits of more available memory will far outweigh the slight reduction of bandwidth.

[Skyline]

Thanks Pete.
Budget isn't a problem so which of those links would be the best choice just performance-wise?

[PeteG@Scan]

Hi,

Either http://www.scan.co.uk/products/12gb-...s-9-9-9-24-15v or http://www.scan.co.uk/products/6gb-%...-9-9-9-24-165v depending on how much memory you wish to finish up with.