Is there any point to buying value ram over the expensive stuff on the

[ooztuncer]

Let me start with this article on Anand dated 10/03/2005: http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2548

 

And continue with this quote:

 

"The biggest deal for many people will be the results using standard PC-3200 RAM and higher memory dividers. While you won't be able to match the performance of a system that uses better quality RAM, the largest margin of victory was still under 10% (not counting instances where 2T command rates were used). The average was closer to 5%, and realistically, you won't notice a 5% performance loss. Outside of games, the performance losses attributed to value RAM are even less, with video encoding only losing a few percentages in speed. What it really comes down to is cost. We used a $190 CPU with $85 and $150 RAM. Going with a 3000+ and the value RAM saves almost $125 and should get you about 90 to 95% of the performance of the more expensive setup. That $125 could then be put towards a faster GPU, which will have a far greater impact on games than a 200 or even 400 MHz CPU upgrade."

 

Agreed:nod:

 

 

Now, my eggsperience... I purchased kvr upon ZEBO's article last year, thanksgiving of 2004 - 5 am best buy foolness. Neither me nor angry was able to even boot the lanparty, eventually had a corrupted bios, and hotflash and $260 quality rams. Besides, it took me 2 months (first board was also rmaed) to get a fully stable -working rig, not kidding!!

 

Now, I cannot defend neither high quality ram nor value ram UNLESS someone/some corporation(ocz-geil-kingston-crucial-mushkin) shows me STATISTICALLY value ram is suitable for DFI nf4 based mobos (not you/me/he/she/they did, it works flawlessly). Don't get this wrong, statistics doesn't only mean frequencies and deviations. I'm talking about real statistical models.

 

Let's say I did a study of 100 different users with half of it using value rams other using quality, and conclude that "no more than 10% performance difference".

 

AND, if somebody asks me what was your sampling procedure, did your data skewed, did you check interactions, did you do independency tests, what about normality check.... Probably, I will answer him, "NO" i didn't do anything like that but it's still better than "he/she/they comparison".

 

You know what, highly likely "NO", it's not better than he/she/they comparison because both of them doesn't depend on any firm assumptions. Garbage in garbage out.

 

I strongly believe that ram manufacturers do not intentionally want to set the differences between what so called value ram and quality one. This fact has many factors. Basically, as usual, cost/benefit(profit)...

 

If I had a ram manufacturing company and specifically set my job as one the "fun" ones like "different opinions manager", I would hire a statistician and start doing statistical modeling with him. Lets take this ram and this motherboard, set the controlled environment, and do statistical tests. Now I am sure "guaranteed" tag under high quality rams is already exposed to this type of testing. However, there are many statistical models that allows you to do sampling from "value ram bin"!

 

If I had a ram manufacturing company and specifically set my job as one the "fun" ones like "CEO", I would hire a marketing specialist and start selling "value" ram:D

 

Look at this thread, 5 people was in support of value rams, couple of them completely disagree, some others are in between! (made up the numbers) See the ceo and marketing person laughing, and statistician is jobless!!

 

My personal opinion, I would buy quality ram because I believe at least some tests have been done on that ram.

 

I think the bigger issue is so called "performance" ram!!

[MyAOLcrashed]

I have OCZ value vx. Paid 1gb $110.

 

512MBx2 @500 3.5v 2228 1T

512MBx4 @512 3.5v 2228 2T

 

I also have OCZ 3200 vx. Paid 1gb $200.

512MBx2 @516 3.5v 2228 1T

 

Does utt=bh5? Value ram can be a better deal.