[Colin_BC]

Hi all. I've been gathering parts for a new build for a little bit now and have reached the point where I'm ready to grab my final pieces of the puzzle and piece it all together. Before the question, here's the main components:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DSR3
CPU: Intel Q6600 Quad Core (G0)

I'm going with stock cooling and stock speeds to start, but I do plan on OC'ing a the crap out it down the road once I get a watercooling setup. My biggest question for right now is what speed ram to go with... My mobo will only support DDR3. That being said, I'm looking at either 4GB of OCZ DDR3 PC3-10666 (1333 mhz) or OCZ PC3-12800 (1600 mhz). My mobo claims to support DDR3 oc'd to 1900 mhz.

With the intent of oc'ing shortly down the road, what RAM of those two would be recommended? Would there even be a difference with the Q6600 CPU? I don't want my RAM to be the limiting factor in my performance and I don't want to make a purchase based on the logic "that number is higher so it must be better....."

Colin

 

[eflyguy]

The Q6600 is not going to be able to take advantage of the speed capabilities of DDR3, so you might as well go with the cheapest you can get your hands on.
..a

 

[puppetworx]

Judging by the latencies I'd go with the PC3-12800s. Don't neglect latencies. But it seems a bit of an odd mismatch to buy a Q6600 and then lots of expensive DDR3. If I was you I'd be getting a Q9450 and some DDR2 with good latency Gigabyte make similar boards to the one you chose out which will run DDR2 or DDR3. Unless there is something special about the board that I'm missing...

Anyways make sure you get low latency RAM, of the two you showed I'd go with the PC3-12800s, but only if I couldn't fit DDR2 in instead.

 

[Colin_BC]

Thanks for thh replies! What was special about the mobo was the sale-price and the flexibilty for down the road. I built my last system in 2001 and it's had a good run. When I built it, my CPU was my limiting factor and noth my ram and mobo couldn't yet be used to their full potential. I was able to upgrade my CPU later on and still utilize the same RAM and mobo from the original build. This is the same mindset I've had while planning this build. I did make a mistake and overlooked the fact that this board only takes DDR3 (I made the assumption it was backwards compatible with DDR2), but I'm not sweating that much as the mobo is the very last component I ever want to upgrade in a build and this mobo should at least provide me with plenty of wiggle-room for a while.

I will probably upgrade the CPU way down the road. That being said, I'd ideally like to ensure the ram I buy now will last for a later-cpu-upgrade. My perspective is it's cheaper in the long run to drop an extra $25-50 into memory that can't be used to it's potential atm as opposed to having to buy one type to use now and then pay to completely replace it with faster stuff down the road. Future-proofing on a long-term budget

PS. Can a wonderful mod please move this to the Intel Ram forum.... I overlooked that on my original post.