Hi
i have just finished my latest build and have decided that i need to upgrade my old 4gb ram for at least 8gb of 1600 mhz.
i have found some cheap ram with the same specs as more expensive ram like corsair or g.skill. Are there any benefits of buying more expensive ram or would i just be paying extra for the branding and fancy heatsink?
Any real world results like standard gaming? No.
Any possible better Overclocking and undervolting results for the extreme enthuseist? Sure. For all we know the more expensive ram might be of much higher quality and bin.
Haha, I benchmarked 1600 MHz RAM that I bought for 10 EUR per 4 GB stick in a matched set, but am running overclocked at 1866 MHz, against premium Kingston 1866 MHz RAM that I bought for 35 EUR per stick in a matched set, and guess what: the cheap (Cn Memory branded) RAM came out on top.
It's a turkey shoot with RAM, sometimes you get a good one, sometimes you get a bad one, just like with CPUs, GPUs and SSDs.
Don't overpay for things that are basically the same. There is exactly the same 2 year full mandatory warranty on 10 EUR sticks than on 35 EUR sticks, and there is the same chance of getting the performance you hope to get...
I buy premium RAM for looks, mostly. RAM performs so closely to each other that unless you really like the wy a more expensive stick looks, it's kind of pointless.
There are usually a couple things that higher end ram offers
1) Heat dispersing plate
2) quality PCB
Though the preformance of the ram COULD be the same, the longevity is the thing you want to look out for
You don't put much, if any stress on the RAM, so a quality PCB doesn't matter much. There are many bad PCBs out there, either.
The heat dispersing plates are also pointless; you can run 2133mHz without a heatsink perfectly fine on modern DDR3, especially on the Samsung Green RAM, and Crucial Ballistix, which are both absolutely fantastic overclockers at low voltages.
Longevity is also a non-issue; if the RAM is below 1.7V, longevity should be about the same all around.
Really, you can cheap out on RAM, as long as it looks good enough, has as low of a CL as possible.
Good for having brand name and if you are using AMD APUs. Logan did a video on this not to long ago and the results did show nice. If you are using intergrated go for the $$$ if you using discreate GPU go cheaper.