Was that guy gonna play Crysis 2, watch Transformers, and post to nerdgasm.com all at the same time?

Yes... 16 GB... overkill.

I don't disagree at all that 4GB (assuming a 64-bit OS) will get you where you need to go, but at the prices I'm seeing today, 8 GB isn't a bad investment unless you know you are only going to be single-tasking with ordinary apps or games.

Or maybe I'm just defending my 8 GB too zealously :-)

Yeah i'd get 8GB as well someday but to me it's too pricey. I'd rather upgrade my two 512 mb sticks to 2GB ones(4GB kit) and upgrade to 6GB and possibly ditch the other two later(which are 1GB each) for two more 2GB sticks as prices drop. That would probably be the best bet, IMO, as buying 4GB sticks seems very cost prohibitive to most average users.

Also ya think? :P

:)

Here is 2 4GB sticks for $99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231428

Now these may not be the right ones for your mobo. The details claim these were designed specifically for Sandy Bridge... but it is still a pretty awesome price.

One year ago, I paid twice that for 4 2GB sticks.

And on a related note, what is causing RAM prices to drop so much?

Those two sticks are cheap only because of the shit timings.....9-9-9-24....seriously?

What is up with timings anyway... I'm not entirely sure how to interpret them or if they really have any practical reason to be worried about by the average user. But I recall back in the day when those numbers were much smaller.

Anyway, if I reply and you reply and I reply, etc., we can keep this thread going for a really long time :-)

Timings means it runs faster and performs read/writes better to and from itself...I don't know all the details, but anything beyond around 6-6-6-6-18 is very shitty. Anything below 5-5-5-15 is pretty sweet supposedly.

All well and good, excellent stuff to know!

On a related note, it really is starting to look like my best bet here would be to assemble the thing piecemeal if I want to get started on it any time soon. If so, where should I start? Case and power supply, then build from there? Or motherboard and processor, THEN case, and so on? Of course I wouldn't be assembling the thing until I had everything ready, but if I do it this way it means I can feel like I've had a little accomplishment over and over until I get it all together.

Buy the component which is on sale right now or has the best deal of all the parts you want right now.

They are latency timings, without being too technical, think of it as the amount of time (measured in clock cycles) they take to respond. It's the delay between the command from the memory controller and the actual availability of the memory requested. So yea the lower they are the better.

The benefit is negligible now though, as you've noticed they've gotten higher the reason being is they've had to be pushed higher as we reach higher frequency memory, despite the higher latency with memory now, the higher frequency decreases the cycle time so the actual access time is lower now than back some years ago even though the numbers are higher today.

I personally wouldn't recommend spending extra money to get ultra tight timing unless it's only a very little extra amount. Otherwise you'll be spending over the odds for little performance gain & you'd see your money better spent getting a better GPU or CPU.

To add an extra opinion. If you're looking to get some parts now & some parts later then plan ahead... That is get parts that aren't going to be obsolete incredibly soon. If you get a CPU & motherboard now but something happens & you don't get the rest til next year, you'll be building an obsolete machine, get a case & PSU, HDDs & so on first, that means when it comes to buying a motherboard/CPU/RAM you'll probably be able to get something either better or what you want now for cheaper, whichever works best for you. Exceptions being times where there are super deals on which you can get very low prices, etc.

Yeah... I get the basic gist of it... but really, if you buy the 9-9-9-24, rather than the (probably) more expensive 5-5-5-15, what is the actual tradeoff from the user experience?

I imagine it makes a big difference to a professional video editor that is rendering out huge files of HD video and sound. But is an office application user gaining anything at all from faster CAS timings? What about the gamer?

There is a part of me that thinks this only matters to benchmark junkies. All that matters to me is that I enjoy playing a game and I can run a lot of apps at once when I'm "working".

Well there should be a noticeable difference in speed when gaming.

Okay... I'm googling.

CAS (Column Address Strobe) latency (CL) is the delay time which elapses between the moment a memory controller tells the memory module to access a particular column in a selected row, and the moment the data from the given array location is available on the module's output pins.

Okay... this timing in synchronous DRAM is expressed in clock cycles, which you can convert to nanoseconds.

To slow this down way down for illustration, when I save a file to my 7200 RPM drive, it saves faster than when I save the same file to my cheaper 5400 RPM drive. But if that file is a 4 MB MP3 file, I cannot, as a human, actually discern the difference in the time... and hard drives are way slower than RAM.

Now, when my friend (who is a video producer) renders a small shot in Premier, the time saved with faster RAM is negligible. If he spent all day making 30 second clips in 640x480, he would not give a damn about time. But the savings adds up, so because he works in HD quality video, producing videos that run 30 to 90 minutes, the faster RAM (hard drives, processors, everything) can be the difference between spending 1 hour rendering versus 4 hours or more... meaning more time for more work.

So, what is the video game doing with memory that creates a difference I'll notice?

Most of the video work is sent to the video card. If we are talking about the game doing the math regarding the trajectory of a bullet or parsing an AI tree, are we really talking about a process that bogs down the average RAM?

This is the thing I still haven't found a clear answer about online.

Theres not really much a difference in gaming, Say you get some standard decent ram with heatsinks for... idk 4gb for $80? and then you buy some uber 1337 ram for about $200 you will be lucky if theres 1FPS difference in gaming, But for editing and stuff, Thats prolly a different story