Desktop upgrade - RAM of choice

kcyeung

kcyeung

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Hi All,

Going to upgrade my 6 years old desktop. I will not notice the difference when I use it but it's a choice at purchase. Will be using i7-4790 and ASUS B85-PRO board.

Any view between these two please?
  • HyperX Savage 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) 2400 MHz DDR3 CL11 DIMM XMP Memory Module (£96)
  • HyperX Savage 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) 1866 MHz DDR3 CL9 DIMM XMP Memory Module (£110)
Cheers,
Art
 
When I googled Asus, your mobo only takes up to 1600?
 
Thanks. Looks like I didn't do enough homework.

Know any other board I should consider ? Or otherwise I will go for the 1600 version.

Thanks
 
Where did you get that information from. The QVL for that board is here: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/B85PRO/HelpDesk_QVL/ All show support for > 1600MHz. TBH, I wouldn't bother unless you are doing a lot of memory intensive computing. TBH I wouldn't go for the i7 over an i5 unless you know you will use it (and I say that as someone who has a few i7 and i5 based PCs).
 
Well.. there you go! Got to love marketing. Have to say the recent Intel mobos I've bought have all been x7 chipsets, which seem to have fewer restrictions on stuff like that.
 
Interesting, the QVL supports > 1600 but they don't have the Savage on the list unless I missed it. I probably will never notice the different but would interest from people who know, 2400MHz CL11 vs 1866MHz CL9.

THB arad85, i7 vs i5, I was just thinking I won't upgrade for probably another 6 years, so just go for the newer model. Re: the ram, looks like I need to do see if I find another ram or board the. I may email ASUS to see what they say about the Savage. I may check out the HyperX Fury too.

Thanks.
 
kcyeung said:
Interesting, the QVL supports > 1600 but they don't have the Savage on the list unless I missed it. I probably will never notice the different but would interest from people who know, 2400MHz CL11 vs 1866MHz CL9.
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The spec. for your board (as pointed to by Mike) shows that the chipset maxes out at 1600. That is... you can put faster RAM in, but it will only run at 1600MHz...

kcyeung said:
THB arad85, i7 vs i5, I was just thinking I won't upgrade for probably another 6 years, so just go for the newer model.
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It isn't newer, just has a more complex processor which gets 15% extra performance IF you are running all cores flat out. I'd save the £50 premium TBH...
 
Good point and I can shift the 50 quid to justify the display card upgrade. I am so out-of-date with the hardware things. Thanks
 
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kcyeung said:
Good point and I can shift the 50 quid to justify the display card upgrade. I am so out-of-date with the hardware things. Thanks
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Why not just use the onboard graphics? If you are NOT gaming or using GPU accelerated software such as Premiere Pro (Photoshop is partially accelerated, just not in most of the areas most photographers use), I wouldn't bother and just use onboard. The mobo you are looking at has
  • Multi-VGA output support : HDMI/DVI/RGB ports
  • - Supports HDMI with max. resolution 4096 x 2160 @ 24 Hz / 2560 x 1600 @ 60 Hz
  • - Supports DVI with max. resolution 1920 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
  • - Supports RGB with max. resolution 1920 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
  • Maximum shared memory of 1024 MB

That should do a couple of decent monitors directly (it may be fiddly to get HDMI working at 2560 x 1600 @ 60HZ - as you may find that you need a high speed HDMI cable and HDMI -> dual DVI-D convertor).
 
My main use of the PC apart from daily usual stuff are Lightroom and other photos processing software. I have visitors coming from overseas so might be able to get it relatively cheaper. I never bother with on board display but things may have moved on... I have two monitors, one dvi on HD and one hdmi 1440p. In theory it would work with the onboard display too. If it doesn't work out I could always slot a card in future. Good another 80 quid saved. :)
 
I've just compared the Haswell i5 and i7 CPUs we provide to our developers at work.
Price increase: approx £40 (30%)
CPU Performance increase: 22%

Yes the high end i5's probably hit the sweet spot but that's not to say an i7 is a waste of money.
(PS. I use an i5-3750 at work and an i7-3770 at home. Home machine feels more spritely for sure).
 
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afasoas said:
I've just compared the Haswell i5 and i7 CPUs we provide to our developers at work.
Price increase: approx £40 (30%)
CPU Performance increase: 22%

Yes the high end i5's probably hit the sweet spot but that's not to say an i7 is a waste of money.
(PS. I use an i5-3750 at work and an i5-3770 at home. Home machine feels more spritely for sure).
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The problem is finding an application that uses that extra performance. Many apps are single threaded - no gain from multiple cores or hyperthreading. Many apps are multi-threaded (e.g. Lightroom) but get up to speed so rarely, and last so short a time compared to user input, that you wouldn't notice a difference anyway (if you do a filter in Lightroom, you're probably at 1-2 sdeconds of processing - whether that takes 1.2 seconds or 1 will not really be noticeable). Where you do win out with an i7 is where you have something really compute intensive (and that isn't strangled by I/O bandwidth). The only really good example I can think of is recoding video (which I occasionally do). There an extra 20% performance is significant. I do 2 pass reencoding which normally takes about real time on my overclocked i7. That is, a 1 hour program takes 1 hour to process. Having it take 72 minutes instead is a significant difference.

Biggest difference in speed on current generation machines I've seen is using a decent SSD. Moving from a mechanical drive on our i7 laptop (yes, I know I said i5 is good enough but you can't get quad core i5 laptop processors) to a decent SSD was a night and day performance increase.
 
I think I am going back to the drawing board again and look at the cost. If I go with i5 4690K, 16GB 1600MHz ram and onboard display card to start with. Then I will have some rooms for maybe choosing a different motherboard.

To many of your points, I will have a noticeable different from my existing PC and I can tweak in future. Interesting to see how Lightroom 6 will use the GPU.
 
In my earlier post when I say i5-3770 I mean i7-3770.

I dont disagree that an i5 is more than adequate but the OP's last machine lasted him six years and a little extra headroom will ensure the next machine will. A more powerful CPU is probably a better choice of expenditure than faster memory.
 
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afasoas said:
I dont disagree that an i5 is more than adequate but the OP's last machine lasted him six years and a little extra headroom will ensure the next machine will. A more powerful CPU is probably a better choice of expenditure than faster memory.
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I have a 4+ year old i7-2600K (OK, it is overclocked, but...). I don't see me changing it any time soon - the only area of expenditure will be bigger SSDs (and possibly a change to 32GB). Processors are so fast and memory so large these days that IMHO, you get much more bang for buck with spending money on things like I/O and a decent PSU/cooling (to get the thing as quiet as possible - my PC is basically silent). If his old PC has lasted 6 years, any newish top-of-the range processor will be a good chunk faster than the old one.

Don't get me wrong, when I upgrade, I will go for an i7 and overclock it. But I know it will occasionally get used fully as I recode video (my PVR is my PC).
 
If it were me I'd go for a Z97 motherboard, something like this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-635-AS
and an i5 4690K
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-540-IN

My reason is the ability to overclock in the future.

To give an example, I bought my last desktop system a few years ago which was an i7 4820K and X79 Asus Sabertooth with 32gb of ram. I didn't bother overclocking at the time.

A few weeks ago I decided to upgrade the drives and thought I'd overclock as well this time. I got about 20% more performance out of the ram and chip. This was like a new PC for free.

So where you might not wish to overclock now, you may want the option in a few years.

On a side note, the board I linked to can use a M2 SSD drive. I recently built a new PC for my camper using one of these drives and they make a standard SSD seem slow.
 
Thanks for the thoughts Wissel. A Z97 is not that much expensive either. Dabs is selling at 100 pounds.

I think my list is nearly completed. Thanks all for y our input. Appreciated.
 
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