Is it better to have 4x 8MB RaM cards or 2 x 16 MB ?

I have been told 4x 8 MB are better, but its more expensive - something like £65 more.
Its a one off decision as its a swap out on a new build.

Alternatively I could try and see how I get on with 16 Mb in total.

Any views why 4x 8 are better?

EDO? Some system information? When I started building, 16MB was a lot!

4 X 8 would be better on a motherboard that supports quad channel. If it has 8 RAM slots I would opt for 4 x 8.

Assuming you have four DIMM slots, theoretically more sticks will be better, in terms of bandwidth. each slot will have XX speed available for the data to move. More slots = more speed.
But I suppose this would depend on the board and chipset in question.

Many of the motherboards I have owned in the past will go even further in the manual explaining exactly the best way to populate the DIMM slots.

All that said, IMHO we are talking about an insignificant change in performance. Just make sure if you use two, that you use the right pair of slots


Going way back, there was a time when one HAD to install in pairs, and the resulting pair was the single addressable RAM unit. this is why the RAM we have now starts with the word "Dual", as the "pair" is built on one stick

Save your money, go with 2x8gb. As Jake said, the difference is inconsequential for almost all applications.

Thanks to everyone for all the assistance.
Yes I am sure it supports quad chanels (I think he said 8 channels ) DDR4 2133 Registered EEC memory ( which I understand is stable quick RAM? ) . and it has 8 memory slots. ( theoretically from 8 x 4GB up to 8 x 32GB ! 256GB - god nows what you would do with all that? And then you can expand it with a riser board lol.

Never know when Skylake arrives and we can use this memeory they may sell it off at £1 a GB - somit might be cheaper than a HDD

Don't bother with 2133MHz RAM, it's only marginally faster than 1333 MHz. It helps some artificial benchmarks, but doesn't really help real work. 1600 is probably a good trade off. Reference. Buy good quality RAM, 1333, 1600, or thereabouts.

Thanks but no choice with this xeon processor. Plus its only a 3.5 to turbo mode 3.9 GHz CPU.

I was thinking of saving thE money and going with 16GB ram total and selecting the NVIDA quadro K2200 with 4 GB ram rather than the initially selected Quadro K620 that has 2 GB.
Would that be a money better placed.
Currently my work is 90% Photoshop still with DPP, Photoshop Elements 12 and Portraiture.
Max 5 % video in 192ox1080p may grow later .
My screen is 3840 x 2160 4K over display port connector.

Would you guys advise to put the cash into the GPU , as if I am going the 8GB route I can always buy the ram later if required. Currently I only have 8GB ram total and it struggles. ( but then that is with a laptop cpu and old 7200 sata disc. New discs will be ssd.

The Xeon isn't really necessary imo, neither is a high end GPU. Integrated graphics on an i7 or i5 are plenty for photo editing. If you must get a dedicated card then get something relatively cheap like an r7 card or lower end GTX.

You can just as easily upgrade the GPU later down the road as you can the RAM, in fact the GPU is the most common upgrade item for most PC owners because of increasing graphical demands with games and video editing. For photos, minimal graphical power is needed.

I do hope you mean GB and not MB. Anyways, i5/i7 processors are dual-channel, meaning you need at least two sticks of RAM to run them efficiently, while X99 is quad-channel meaning that you need 4 sticks, but the word "efficiently" doesn't necessarily translate to real-world performance. One computer hardware reviewer recently tested in putting 128GB of RAM into an X99 system, and then took out all sticks of RAM except for one 16GB unit, in real-world applications it was just as fast as having all sticks in.

With DDR3 it's been extensively tested that the difference between the cheapest bargain 1033 sticks and most expensive 3000+ sticks was around 10~15% performance, and only in applications that heavily relied on RAM speed. With DDR4 the speeds are so fast, that it won't be a bottleneck ever, even if you just have one stick in there running in single-channel mode.

What I'm getting at is - just get the cheapest RAM at whatever capacity you need.

tim wrote in post #17607324
Don't bother with 2133MHz RAM, it's only marginally faster than 1333 MHz. It helps some artificial benchmarks, but doesn't really help real work. 1600 is probably a good trade off. Reference. Buy good quality RAM, 1333, 1600, or thereabouts.

He will be using DDR4 so 2133MHz is the slowest available.

Why would a photographer have Xeon and a quadro card? Waste of money. i7, 16GB standard RAM (32GB if you're going for overkill), and an SSD or two is all you need.

Why would a photographer have Xeon and a quadro card? Waste of money. i7, 16GB standard RAM (32GB if you're going for overkill), and an SSD or two is all you need.

Why would a photographer have Xeon and a quadro card? Waste of money. i7, 16GB standard RAM (32GB if you're going for overkill), and an SSD or two is all you need.