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Memory: Corsair vs. everyone else
Ok, so I'm looking at memory.
Someone says G.SKILL 8gb (2x4gb) is good.
But I'm just making sure that Corsair or someone else isn't better, for a little more.
I trust Quizzical's advice; I'm just obsessing over it, when maybe the G.SKILL will be good enough.
I don't see Corsair having anything similar on Newegg or Amazon.
Speaking of Amazon, they have some items cheaper, so I might go with them for those items.
This is my signature.
Comments
I've always liked G.Skill myself. I've not really tried any of their low end line though. Mid to high end is top notch though.
This guy has the Corsair I'm looking for:
http://www.ecrater.com/p/10517517/corsair-xms3-8gb-2-x-4gb-ddr3
For about $20.00 more plus his shipping isn't free.
Here it is on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Vengeance-240-Pin-platforms-CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9/dp/B004CRSM52/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1298062448&sr=8-2
The 2 reviews say the timings are off.
The more I look, the more I edit. This is why I like to post right when the computer room closes.
Here is another Corsair on Amazon, $85.00 or so with good reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-PC3-10666-240-Pin-Memory-CMX8GX3M2A1333C9/dp/B003N8GVUY/ref=sr_1_12?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1298062791&sr=1-12
This is my signature.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145315&cm_re=xms3-_-20-145-315-_-Product
The name brand you buy isn't who actually makes the memory. The memory chips themselves are usually made by Samsung or Hynix.
What the company you buy from does, they take those chips, mount them on the little green boards that you plug into your computer, maybe slap a heatsink on it, put their sticker on the front, and mark it up.
So most all of the RAM out there comes from the same three or four places anyway. What you really need to look at, however, is the return and warranty policy. RAM is the #1 component of a computer likely to fail or be shipped DOA (it's highly static sensitive). If you need to RMA a single component from a new computer build, it's three times more likely to be a DIMM than any other component.
Here are some graphs I found, I would take them with a grain of salt as they don't necessarily get an accurate representation of the entire spectrum of parts shown, but you can see that memory return rates are extremely high compared to other components.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=263481
Here is a page (in french, Google Translated) that lists reliable manufacturers (based on RMAs) of various components. It's a bit older (2009), but most of the companies on there are still around
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=y&u=http://www.hardware.fr/articles/773-1/taux-pannes-composants.html&sl=fr&tl=en&history_state0=
Personally, I use Kingston because I've had good luck with them, and they have a liberal return policy/warranty. They do tend to be a bit pricier on average though, when you start looking at timings.
I have been running G-Skill ram in the last three builds and they got my vote, I used to use OCZ & Muskin prior to that.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
The key, functional part of memory modules is the SDRAM chips. Corsair, G.Skill, Kingston, Patriot, OCZ, and so forth don't actually build the memory chips. Rather, they buy the chips from Samsung, Hynix, Elpida, or some others. They bin the chips to make sure that the chips on a given module are essentially identical, build (or buy?) the PCB, attach the memory chips, and so forth.
I'm rather skeptical that Hynix memory chips on a Corsair module will perform so much better than the identical bin of Hynix memory chips on a G.Skill or Kingston module. Now, different memory companies could buy from different mixes of suppliers, and some are more aggressive in their claimed stock speeds than others.
The real exception to this is Crucial (which is the same company as Micron), which actually does build their own memory chips. So if you buy from Crucial, you're not getting physically identical chips in different packaging. But I don't have any reason to believe that Crucial memory is any better or worse than that of their competitors.
Memory is, for the most part, a commodity. If you buy apples at a grocery store, you don't question whether they were grown at this or that particular farm. It doesn't matter much, as the apples will be essentially the same either way. Memory with given stock settings (clock speed, latency timings, voltage) is essentially the same, regardless of which company you buy it from. Even if a module from one company has an extra 1% chance of failing for whatever reason, it's easy to replace memory and not that hard to diagnose memory problems, so it's not worth spending an extra 20% up front to avoid that. It's not at all like power supplies or motherboards, where paying some extra up front for better reliability is often worthwhile.
One exception that I'd note is OCZ, which manages to pretty consistently rack up awful customer ratings for their memory on New Egg. That might be shoddy manufacturing quality control, overly aggressive binning so that memory can't quite run at stock timings but is otherwise fine, or various other things. I'm not sure why they get such bad ratings. OCZ is pulling out of the memory industry entirely, too, in order to focus on selling good solid state drives and bad power supplies. (Okay, so their power supplies aren't that bad. But they're not very good, either, and I'd advise against buying one.)
Thank you all, I'm deciding between G.SKILL, Kingston and CORSAIR. As of now.
For 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333. But one G.SKILL is PC3 10600 and another is PC3-10666 and the Kingston is PC3 10600, while the Corsair is also PC3-10666, listed as such on Amazon but not on Newegg. I don't know what this means, but I suspect it's minor.
The CORSAIR has mostly positive reviews and a few negative ones.
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1333 MHz DDR3 is 10666 MB/s. They're effectively different units that tell you the same thing about speed. The actual computation (ignoring rounding) is 667 MHz (the real clock speed) * 2 (for DDR) * 64-bit memory bus width * (1 byte / 8 bits) = 10666 MB/s.
Do make sure that they're rated at 1.5 V. You may also want to check the memory latency timings, where lower is better. Well, a little better, but in practice, not a lot better.
They are all 1.5V. Thank you all for your help (again).
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Kingston still the best memory for me
Corsair makes great memories but several other companies make as good. Kingston is the classic company with life time warranty. Samsung also make very fine memories (still upsets me that their Rambuss memories got beaten by DDR memories).
OCZ makes acceptable memories as well, even if I prefer the 3 mentioned before.
personally i only use ram from companies i trust, so i don't tend to buy ram from places i've never heard of etc.. for me that means i only buy Kingston and Corsair ram, i've never even heard of gskill so im guessing its a new company, generally speaking though, if someone is selling something cheaper than everyone else, then its probably not as reliable, bottom line is i hate having to buy stuff twice.
G.Skill is a 22 year old company, just a hair younger than Kingston and older and Corsair.
As for who to buy RAM from, every possible attribute that affects how RAM will behave in a system, other than compatibility and overclockability, is clearly listed. The other two are pretty much a matter of statistics; with that in mind, note how every single person here who's made mention, and pretty much every single review of their products anywhere (barring a couple forms of SDR memory... like anyone uses that anymore
) have absolutely glowing reviews.
That doesn't leave a whole lot of probability of one not having a good experience with their sticks. I bought two dirt cheap DDR2-800 G.Skill sticks as holdover sticks when my expensive Crucial Ballistix DDR-1066 sticks kicked the bucket almost immediate after I bought them. When I discovered they matched the Crucial Ballistix sticks (they could overclock to about the same speeds, despite being binned lower and costing half as much), I decided to run them side-by-side with the Crucial sticks in that machine (each a 2GB kit). This was back during the rough transition period between gaming systems having 2GB and 4GB, so while 2GB of the Ballistix would have been enough, there was no reason not to just keep all four sticks (instead of just shoving them in some other machine; I had a lot of DDR2 memory in systems back then). Good thing, too, because not a month later, I was accepted to the Age of Conan closed beta... it was very RAM hungry.
Anyways, two things never happened after that. I never bought RAM from anyone else, and I have never bought RAM that failed to surpass my expectations... and I've probably bought half a dozen kits since then. So, is G.Skill RAM good because I've had good experiences? Absolutely not. It's good because everyone has good experiences
It's the only case in computing that I know of where the company peddling the cheap stuff is also peddling the good stuff, but hey, might as well take advantage, right? 
Corsair vs kingston. well here in my country usually comp shops use kingston brand, because of its affordable and easy to acquire unlike corsair which is fairly expensive and not easy to come by.
I've been using corsair for 5 years now, it never let me down ones good timings, good headspread. well OT i think Gskill can go toe to toe with corsair according to the post 2 up from here.
GSkill is all I use now.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Why, Rambus memory was terrible, same marketing > functionality that led to the terrible Pentium NetBurst architecture with super high GHz but terrible per clock performance. Great for marketing, terrible for using.
Rambus had huge throughput but terrible latency.
corsair is quite expensive but the quality is great. this is my memory brand of choice.