Have a question.

Building a machine for Q9450 (till february will have E6750). I will not OC the machine, just want pure stability and quality of all the components.

Now, my question is:

Q9450 has 1333fsb, what DDRII memory should fit here, 800Mhz or 1066Mhz? (I will not OC)


Mobo will be Asus P5K-E.
(Not shure what it means for 1066Mhz DDRII becouse it says

"The chipset officially supports the memory frequency up to DDR2 800MHz. Tuned by ASUS Super Memspeed Technology, this motherboard natively supports up to DDR2 1066MHz"

DD2 800(even if u wanted to OC, i would recommended DDR2 800 because the difference isnt much and DDR2 800 OCs very well too)

I'd get Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800. It actually supports higher speeds and lower latency than any competing-brand DDR2-1066 I've tested.

I would look at DDR2-1066.

You would want to reach at least DDR2-1000 Speeds to start pushing the OC limit of that chip.

DDR2-1000 will put it just under 4.0 Ghz.

Folks were hitting this on 1.4v on some tests I saw and that was with reasonable temps.
That would mean that the Low 4.x Ghz should be doable if your ram is fast enough.

I'm not sure what the FSB walls of that Mobo is, however.
You may want to research a bit.

But I WILL NOT overclock, becouse I need the machine rock solid for audio production.

What about the CL4 and CL5 difference?


I was thinking GEIL 2x2Gb 800Mhz CL4 DDRII. Is that a good choice in my case?

Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800 is rated CAS 4 as well.

Is there a difference in my case if getting CL4 over CL5 ?

What is actually difference between two?

If you are not going to OC, then DDR2-800 is perfectly fine.
You will not notice a difference in the RAM.

Ok, tnx for your help.

Actually if you arent overclocking and want a 1:1 memory/bus ratio you dont need anything above DDR667. So basically anything 667 and above will be fine.

CAS 4 has a 20% faster response time than CAS 5. This has minimal effect on most programs, since CAS 5 is already so quick at DDR2-800 cycle times.

So there is no sense of buying CL4? (the price diference is 20€)

As I'm building this comp for using it with VSTi's (Software Instruments) which works above all with memory, is there maybe an effect in this programs like Cubase, Nuendo ... ?

I know that some programs show larger performance gains from lower latency memory, but I'm not sure which programs are affected.

Too bad you don't get U.S. prices, I was recommending Ballistix in part because 2x1GB costs around $60 here.