SYSTEM MEMORY
More, more, more! Can you ever have too much memory?
Memory is probably one of the least sexy of the upgrades on offer. After all, unless you're foolish enough to be trying to run an APU as fully fledged gaming system, then you're not going to get much benefit from boosting the memory inside your beloved rig.
Or are you? Memory performance is a lot more opaque when it comes to assessing how it affects your computing experience - it's more about what you do with your PC and how you use it. For most of us. 4GB is a perfectly adequate amount of memory to be jamming in your rig, but with prices of DRAM being so low these days - especially for the sort of performance RAM we're talking about here - you're never going to lose out sticking a good chunk more memory in your rig.
Granted, dropping £200 on a 32GB kit is probably going a tad overboard, but when you can pick up an 8GB upgrade for less than £40 it's certainly well worth a gander.
MEMORY MATTERS
Gaming is probably the least memory intensive thing you do with your PC - after all. most of the games that we're playing these days have been put together with the last generation of consoles very much in mind. Those sealed boxes are so memory limited that developers have worked around the scarcity of DRAM, and so the resulting titles that hit the PC aren't so bothered about system RAM and are more interested in what your GPU is up to. For those sorts of games. 4GB is really all you’re going to need.
That said, there are some PC-specific titles that very much benefit from a memory upgrade. Titles like my beloved Football Manager; with its heavy emphasis on computation and data processing, soak up any memory on offer. And if you're doing anything that requires multi-tasking and switching between programs - or anything that requires a lot of computational work - then more RAM is always handy. Although we're talking up desktop upgrades in this feature, memory is also one of the few upgrades anyone can do to their laptop. Doubling the RAM on offer in your portable machine can really make a difference to how it performs, and again needn't cost the earth to install.
But as I said, this is all about the desktop and in that market Crucial's Ballistix Tactical LP range has really captured our imagination in recent months. As CPU coolers get ever larger and impinge on the DIMM slots of your mobo, a set of low profile RAM modules can really help.
It also helps that these low profile modules are so darn good. This kit is rated at 1.600MHz. but is capable of running at much higher frequencies - we had the 8GB modules running at 2,133MHz without trying. Because they're low voltage they can be pushed when it comes to overclocking.
They're pretty low latency too. and that's arguably more important than raw speed.
RECOMMENDATION:
Crucial Ballistix Tactical LP 8GB
Price £39
Manufacturer Crucial
Web www.crucial.com
Capacity 8GB (2x 4GB)
Speed 1.600MHz
Latency 8-8-8-24
Voltage I35v
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