Do you need premium memory?
In the old days, RAM was plain and not actually something to show off. Now with the advent of transparent casings and overclocking, we have a couple of RAM variations that are considered “premium”. We got ones with heatspreaders, with better overclockabilty, with some quipped with LED’s showing off status. But do you need them?
According to PC Magazine: “Now is a buyer’s market for premium DDR2 memory. Your choices range from modestly overclockable modules with heat spreaders, which command only a slight premium over value memory, to bleeding-edge modules that can hit clock speeds as high as 533 MHz (DDR2-1066) and require voltages higher than 1.8V. Recently, we’ve seen DDR2 modules from PNY rated to use as much as 2.3V.”
What are the advantages of premium memory? High-end DRAM chips are bin-sorted—a term manufacturers use to refer to sorting chips that can run at different speeds into “speed bins” to hit high voltages and frequencies. These chips can run at lower latency timings than standard DRAM. Finding exactly the right timing setting can be daunting. It’s often a trial-and-error process that involves many reboot, test, and reset cycles.
The serious overclockers among you will want to push the memory speed up to 1,100 MHz or more. Overclockers will also need to run their memory at higher voltages, so it’s important to have a good motherboard with a beefy voltage regulator section and a BIOS setup that lets you tweak all your memory settings.
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