8 GB of RAM

[dmethoxibit]

Im still wating for new chipset releases for my Ultimate OMEGA PC and was wondering...if 8 gb of ram is really worth it. Is it? Will anything take advantage of that or will bottleneck the system. i plan on having a 64 bit op of course, a quadcore and 2 hd in raid 0. and is ddr3 still faster than ddr2 even with the lower latency's? thank you

[The Wise Monkey]

DDR3 is very fast, but is much too expensive at the moment. If you want to spend that much on RAM, buy some ultra low latency DDR2, as the latency has more of an effect on performance.

8GB of RAM is definitely not worth it, as you will never use that much. 2GB is more than enough for everyday use, but you might want to stretch to 4GB if you are planning on doing lots of video/photo editing.

[jleonard711]

It sounds like you're wanting a fairly 'cutting edge' system, so I would defintely go with 4GB over 2GB. But he's right, you will almost never use the full potential of the 8GB RAM unless you are doing extremely RAM intensive processes like video editing or CAD or things like that. I just upgraded my 2GB to 4GB and it made a world of difference in the way Vista performs, so I would highly recommend 4GB.

And you should go with 2x2GB sticks rather than 4x1GB, so that way you can always leave the option to get another 2GB or 4GB later on down the road if you feel that you need it.

[Jamie Nixx]

Even the most Ram intensive programs out there will not use 8GB, even CAD or video editing applications.

If your using XP or Vista 32bit, get 2GB, if you are using Vista 64bit, get 4GB.

DDR3 has a terrible performance to price ratio, much like DDR2 when it first came out so its definately worth it to get DDR2 for now for price and performance, then in around 6 months time DDR3 will be priced accordingly and you can upgrade then.

Just remember that if you blow a load of money on this system, it won't stay ultimate for very long, maybe a month, 2 tops, then it will be average. It sucks i know, when i first started building, technical leaps were made maybe once a year, maybe even more, now they are happening basically every month or even less which means computers you think are excellent when you buy them are surpassed in terms of performance a lot quicker.