Hey guys, Nate here, and I'm building a gaming computer. I'm gonna take it step-by-step, so I'm starting off with RAM. A couple of questions I have are:

Do RAM speeds matter?

and

DDR4 or DDR3?

If you can help me out with this, I'd be forever grateful. Thank you!!

I just built a machine and I went with DDR3. The speed advantages of DDR4 are currently so sparse and minimal regarding gaming as to not make up for the cost difference. This'll change over the next couple of years, so it's kind of all about "future-proofing."

EDIT: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/ddr4-haswell-e-scaling-review-2133-to-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial/8

RE-EDIT: This is what I went with, along with an i5 4690K and an EVGA GTX 980--that's where the cash went...--and The Witcher 3 is 60 FPS so far at 1080 on ultra.

Similar advice as to your other topic, but you should probably stick with DDR3 and put more money into a GPU. You can also get away with some low latency 1600 mhz DDR3, you don't need any xTrEmE gAmInG RAM or anything like that. Stay away from RAM that has giant ass heatsinks, you just need good, stable RAM. One of my favorites is Corsair Vengeance Low Profile, it looks bad ass and gives you plenty of clearance for CPU coolers and what not. It's not expensive, either. Should be under $50 for 2x4 GB.

@mike http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231666&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-PCPartPicker,%20LLC-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID= This looks pretty damn good for the price.

@cappak: It looks fine, but I would never buy RAM with heatsinks that tall. Depending on the configuration of your motherboard, one day you may end up in a situation where you are limited on what kind of CPU cooler you can use because of clearance issues.

I'm probably in the minority when it comes to that, but there is no practical reason you need giant heatsinks on RAM like that, especially if you aren't pushing extra voltage and overclocking.

For gaming, no. Sure, DDR4 is faster a little bit (and it uses less power), but you aren't going to notice much difference in games with it. Also, it's about 2x the cost of DDR3 at the moment.

You should actually be thinking about whether or not you're committed to making the jump to an X99 motherboard. If you're going to to some intensive non-gaming processes to your computer, then it's probably worth it -and it should be worth it within a year- but if you're just concerned with gaming performance, then it's going to do nothing for you for the foreseeable future.

Is the whole thing with DDR4 that it has faster read/write times?

I'm not sure about DDR3 vs DDR4 but the clock speed of the RAM can sometimes make a difference. From what I understand it depends on your CPU. If your getting an i5 or i7 then RAM speed doesn't matter so much, but if your going for an i3 then it might be worth looking into as faster ram can alleviate a potential bottleneck. Digital Foundry did a couple of interesting videos.

I recently built a Skylake PC and had to use DDR4 unless i want to fry the ram/motherboard. Although there are some motherboards that support DDR3 but i found the ports to be inadequate.

From HardOCPs benchmarks.

Skylake RAM Scaling for the Enthusiast

As we have shown in the gaming benchmarks, Skylake needs to be able to have the availability of more memory bandwidth, especially as we clock the processor up. My thought is if you are going to be moving to a Skylake platform for gaming, you should be shooting for no less than 2666MHz RAM.

From personal experience, I just upgraded from DDR3 1600mhz to 2133mhz RAM on my PC (3570K) and honestly I wasn't expecting to notice much of a difference but my computer actually feels smoother (could be placebo effect from upgrading your computer).

Personally, I don't think DDR4 RAM is worth it for the price right now. I'd rather be able to afford more RAM in general or invest in other parts.

As someone who has worked in and around VFX and video production it matters, but not so much to the average person playing games. But I will always take more ram both in size and speed, anything to reduce renders and preview buffering is awesome.

And Cosair is always the safe bet for cheap middle range ram.

The only time it really matters is for APUs which I assume since you're building a gaming rig, you'll have a dedicated video card so that doesn't apply. Just buy decent ram (any of the big brands like Kingston, G Skill, Corsair, etc.) will work fine.

Note that they are running benchmarks at super low resolutions in order to prevent video card bottlenecking (they even said in the article that these benchmarks are in no way representative of real world scenarios). In real world benchmarks using any decent GPU at normal resolutions such as 1080p, the differences in RAM speed on actual gaming performance is negligble. Also, the price between a kit of 2133 mhz DDR4 RAM and a kit of 2666 mhz DDR4 RAM is not large. It's not until you get above 3000 MHz where you see a big jump in terms of pricing.

The bottom line is that as long as you are getting a decent capacity of RAM (I would say that in this case capacity > speed), you should put most of the money toward the graphics card rather than higher speed RAM.

@spazmaster666:Funny thing, Kyle from HardOCP said the same thing when I brought that up in there forums. Find the right capacity you need and buy the fast RAM you can afford.

@the_ruckus: I usually recommend Corsair ram but I must be having bad luck with there sticks. Switched to Gskill and now my comp is super smooth again.