3GB, 6GB or 12GB Investigated

The price of DDR3 has lowered slightly but it is still significantly higher than DDR2 and if you want the latest CPU from Intel and want to get the most out of it, a triple DDR3 kit must be on your shopping list. Luckily for us, the prices have dropped enough now that kits can be bought for little more than DDR2 so the damage is not too great. But what size kit should you buy? 3 GB would be enough for most people surely? What of the rumours that 6GB is now the standard and gives the best performance? Should I go for broke and get 12GB, after all bigger is always better right?

The benchmarks I ran today certainly do not scream 'buy 12GB now' and for the most part I would agree. 12GB is a ridiculous amount of DDR3 to install in an everyday system, it gives no noticeable performance gains for gaming (unless you are a system hog), little performance difference in what I assumed would be it's biggest selling point, video encoding and limited our overclocks by at least 200MHz. Photoshop showed the biggest gains overall but unless you are dealing with some very big images and applying lots of filters then 6GB would cope easily. It also had an effect in general Vista use but not enough to make me rush out and buy upgrade. Perhaps if one were to change their gaming habits and worry less about the number of open applications then the benefits of gaming with 12GB would be much more apparent.

3GB performed surprisingly well. Although we have shown it to come bottom of the pile in the benchmarks we have run, you certainly would not notice it, at least until you started to edit large files in photoshop, or have the luxury of trying out a higher capacity system. Maybe that's a little harsh but after doubling and then tripling the capacity, the 3GB kit just felt inferior.

So the 6GB kit gives the perfect happy medium. The gains 12GB had over the 6GB kit were minimal overall and this time there was minimal difference in Vista's performance as opposed to the 3GB kit. The 6GB kit did not appear to put anywhere near as much stress on the CPU, given that we achieved 200 MHz more. Once the 6GB threshold is exceeded, performance differences seemed to diminish. There were simply not enough differences between the 2 kits to warrant the extra cash injection needed. Sure, a full rack of memory looks the part and certainly grants those extra E-Peen points people yearn for but the sensible money goes on the 6GB kit, at least until Microsoft decide to munch through more of our memory with a new Operating system.