I was wondering what kind of performance difference (if any) I could expect between those two, paired with a 2600k clocked at 4.5ghz. I'm not honestly expecting much, but I don't know enough about memory to know for sure.
I do know the extra 8GB will be put to good use either way.
Not sure if this applies to sandy bridge processors. You should be fine with it. Just keep an eye on your CPU's voltage, temps, and clock speed. Make sure the RAM isn't doing anything weird in regards to overclocking or overvolting your CPU.
Yeah, use the stuff you won. In a few years, with games, we may start seeing a need for more than 8GB (honestly, right now, 8GB is even more than needed, although due to the nature of 2^n it's the best amount of ram to have) but not one game i play uses more than 60% of my 8GB at 2133 MHz.
But like DeusAres said, faster RAM never hurt anyone.
I'd love to buy what I have now, but they stopped making it a week after I bought it.
I wouldn't have paid 150 bucks for that memory, but I'm getting it free, so...
And I'll definitely be using the AMD stuff when it gets here, no question. I just wanted to know if I could expect any tangeable difference, besides obviously having double the amount.
Actually I remember seeing somewhere (unfortunately this was a while ago, so I don't have the source) a bench on the topic of how Latencies and MHz affect performance. For the most part, games actually tend to like higher MHz at the expense of latencies, but programs like video editing and other heavy programs reap the rewards of low MHz and low Latencies. It really just depends on what the user does.
Now I know you said outrageously, smartass :) -I just thought it would be interesting to share.
Yeah, once you pass a certain point bandwidth slumps down again. Even 1.65 volts isn't too dangerous, on intels. Not sure how amd handles that. Either way, its worth playing with the numbers and running maxmem, or even the windows memory thingy. Type winsat mem in the dos box or whatever it is called. I am tired, maybe I'll post something more constructive later if I remember.
Yeah, once you pass a certain point bandwidth slumps down again. Even 1.65 volts isn't too dangerous, on intels. Not sure how amd handles that. Either way, its worth playing with the numbers and running maxmem, or even the windows memory thingy. Type winsat mem in the dos box or whatever it is called. I am tired, maybe I'll post something more constructive later if I remember.
1.65 is the voltage on my 2133mhz beast ram in my amd system, never had any problems with it.
in gaming i get probably 1 OR 2 fps more in some games but its negligable (some games like f1 get crazy fps boosts from having faster ram but those situations are rare).
From the AIDA64 test (photo manipulation one) you get far more benefit in content creation from overclocked memory than you do in gaming.