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I'm buying entire new innards for my rig for the first time in five years; most of it has been upgraded but it's still running same AMD Athlon64 and Gigabyte motherboard that I put in it back in '07, and it's high time to retire it. That being said, I'm completely stepping away from my comfort zone of AMD, Gigabyte, and Mushkin and turning to Intel, ASUS, and (probably) g.skill.
So far I've picked out the following:
ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3
Intel Core i5-2500K with a Zalman fan
Intel 520 Series Cherryville 60GB or OCZ Vertex 3 60GB (undecided)
I'm still working on what RAM I want to put in mainly due to trying to squeeze in as much performance for the money, and this time around I'm trying to balance "as-is" performance with the possibility of overclocking down the road. With that in mind, what I've come down to is the question of buying higher frequency RAM over something slower and how the timings work out. I'm aware that the 2500K runs at 1333 and will clock whatever I choose to that speed by default (if I'm reading it right); so I'm definitely buying some DDR3-1600 CAS8 if nothing else. But say I purchase some DDR3-2133 CAS9 - what timings am I looking at if it runs at 1333? Would I get lower timings with that, or DDR3-1833 CAS9 get lower timings than the 2133 at 1333? I've always bought Mushkin RAM, and only checked to make sure I had the highest speed for my board with as low latency as I could get; I've never used Intel or ASUS, nor overclocked at all. What I'm hoping is that someone can give me a straight, no-frills answer on this; while I've read around quite a bit and this post came VERY close to answering most of the niggling questions I had, I couldn't find a definite answer to this (that I understood).
Edit: Also, about dual-channel - how would four sticks of 2GB versus two sticks of 4GB play into the equation?
So far I've picked out the following:
ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3
Intel Core i5-2500K with a Zalman fan
Intel 520 Series Cherryville 60GB or OCZ Vertex 3 60GB (undecided)
I'm still working on what RAM I want to put in mainly due to trying to squeeze in as much performance for the money, and this time around I'm trying to balance "as-is" performance with the possibility of overclocking down the road. With that in mind, what I've come down to is the question of buying higher frequency RAM over something slower and how the timings work out. I'm aware that the 2500K runs at 1333 and will clock whatever I choose to that speed by default (if I'm reading it right); so I'm definitely buying some DDR3-1600 CAS8 if nothing else. But say I purchase some DDR3-2133 CAS9 - what timings am I looking at if it runs at 1333? Would I get lower timings with that, or DDR3-1833 CAS9 get lower timings than the 2133 at 1333? I've always bought Mushkin RAM, and only checked to make sure I had the highest speed for my board with as low latency as I could get; I've never used Intel or ASUS, nor overclocked at all. What I'm hoping is that someone can give me a straight, no-frills answer on this; while I've read around quite a bit and this post came VERY close to answering most of the niggling questions I had, I couldn't find a definite answer to this (that I understood).
Edit: Also, about dual-channel - how would four sticks of 2GB versus two sticks of 4GB play into the equation?
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