So I have an older Biostar tz77b motherboard with an older i7 2600k and I was looking for some cheap RAM to purchase for this combo.
It does use DDR3 and prices for this type of RAM are going up because they are going out of production. The motherboard does support up to 32GB's of DDR3-2600 (using XMP) through four DIMM ports.
Ideally I want at least 16GB's of RAM (two 8GB sticks), probably over 1866Mhz. Heat spreaders always seemed kinda pointless to me, so I don't care either way. Of course no error correcting.
I am looking for whatever is the cheapest, and something that just works. But I have no idea where the best places to shop online are for these things. I should also point out that I am in Canada, so that does limit my choices by a small amount. But many online stores do ship to Canada, even Amazon.com (not to be confused with Amazon.ca) ships many items to Canada even through their American storefront. I don't mind paying a few extra duty fees.
Hmm... well I was hoping to go under $100 Canadian.
I did see two 8GB modules of DDR3-2400 of Corsair RAM for less than $90 dollars Canadian on Amazon.ca, but that sale ended before days before I thought about buying it. But right now it seems like $6.62 is the cheapest per GB I can get in Canadian prices. $109.99 for some DDR3-2133 G.Skill Ripjaws Series. I might look into that.
I am also curious if there is any cheap second hand memory out there too, if possible.
Look around, see what people offer and compare prices. ebay.ca mostly shows ECC RAM (and I think those only work on workstation motherboards; I could easily be wrong, though).
Yeah, it is hard to sift through all the ECC stuff when sorting by cheapest price on EBAY and Amazon. That is why I made this post, to see if anyone could direct me to specific types/ brands of RAM that might fit into my own search criteria.
ECC is limited to specific types of motherboards, generally server and workstation related. Like you said. Sometimes for accounting too. No this motherboard does not support ECC.
That is a reasonable price. But I don't think this TZ77B supports more than 8GB modules. At least not without some sort of BIOS update. Maybe... I dunno... ?
The actual speed of the ram doesnt really matter that much. Especially not at that platform. I personally allways really liked those G.skill Sniper 1866mhz 1.5V rams. But yeah basicly ram is ram, there will not really be a significant performance diffrence.
I thought memory speeds did matter up to a point? Especially when overclocking. I do plan on overclocking the 2600k in this build and I think something over 1600 might be beneficial. But maybe something over 1866 is unneeded? This motherboard can overclock, but I think it can't be pushed that hard, so I don't believe I would be able to push the CPU as far as I want it to go.
But this is also an Ivy Bridge motherboard and can support 3XXXk CPU's as well. It makes me wonder if I should ditch the 2600k for a 3770k overclocked? Would faster memory benefit? Personally I think the overclocked 2600k would be kinda similar.
The difrences between both the 2600K and 3770K overclocked to similar clockspeeds will be minor. Maybe something like 5% to 10% overall. The only benefit you will have from using a 3770K on a Z77 board will be that you actually get pci-e 3.0 support. The Sandybridge cpu´s only support pci-e2.0 even on a Z77 board. So what you will mainly gain is pci-e bandwith.
As far as ram speeds are concerned for pretty much 95% of the general desktop usage tasks it wont really impact performance that much, atleast not really that noticable. There are of course certain heavy memory demending tasks on which memory speeds will have an impact, but that arent really tasks that a general home user would do. Or for gaming if you use the igpu instead of a dedicated gpu for example. But for normal gaming with an i7 + dedicated gpu, the memory speeds will be very little to no impact. Especially because the i72600K overclocked wont realy become a bottleneck that much, even not for a GTX1080, but it will need an overclock for a card highend and new like that. Super high ram speeds arent really going to be that helpfull, for most everyday use. With a balanced cpu + gpu combo, the memory speeds will have very little impact on gaming performance. It will be minimal, maybe marginal at best for some game titles.
Really if you're doing things on a computer in which you will see a marked performance difference based purely on getting faster ram, you should be getting a brand new system because you're doing some heavy lifting (more advanced video editing, running a ram disk, etc.).
Ram speed only matters in those situations I just mentioned (and some other advanced things I'm drawing a blank on) OR if you're stressing the igpu. For gaming it's purely the capacity that will help you. You may see a 1-3 fps difference going from 1333mHz to 2800mHz and for the added cost it's just not worth it. In most all of today's games the GPU is doing the heavy lifting, that's not to say the cpu isn't important... some games like GTAV utilize both parts to achieve their tasks but in most games it's not nearly as important as the gpu. Basically if you have enough ram you'll be fine regardless of speed, if you don't have enough ram you're hurting regardless of speed.
Basicly something like 1600mhz ram would be more then fine for op. The only reason why i mentioned those G.skill sniper 1866mhz, is because those are on 1.5V. Instead of 1.65V on which allot of 1866mhz or higher kits run on. I suppose that the 2600K supports 1600mhz by default without overclocking.
Thanks for the help on that, so what you're saying is that 1600MHz should be good enough? I do not plan on using the integrated GPU in the i7 core, for the time being I am using a 660ti 3GB. It is OK for desktop tasks and some gaming, but it runs terrible for a lot of current games. I plan on replacing it with something else soon.
A 1080 is a bit too pricey (especially in Canadian dollars), but I was thinking about going with a RX480 for this build, as it fits into my price range. But I might go with a 1060 since it is similarly priced. I generally go with Nvidia cards because I am also an avid Linux user (I have been using it for almost 10 years ><) , and generally the Nvidia drivers have always been less of a hassle to deal with. But there has been some interesting developments with the AMD open and closed source drivers on Linux, so I am interested in going over to team red this time.
1600mhz is more then fine, i use them myself. I have tested this 1600mhz vs 2400mhz corsair dominators, and i pretty much saw no exciting improvements to call my friends about.
Hmm, just had 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 go bad on me and awaiting an RMA, it’s a long time coming and hope I don’t end up having to pay for replacement…2 days supposed reply after a week doesn’t bode well for good customer service so I’d cut them out in what to buy .