Hey, I know it’s virtually no difference in gaming, but I’ve found 16gb of 1866mhz ram for £100 and I’m wondering if it’d make any difference with vfx/video based things? (maya, after effects, nuke, etc)
Also, you think it’d be likely the price of ram will drop anytime soon, or is it worth going for this while it’s available?
It will make absolutely no difference whatsoever (at least on intel platforms).
Even in overclocking circles, outside of the number fetish game that has no real purpose other than entertaining yourself with the results and the process to achieve them, RAM certified that far out of the base clock hardly has much of an impact.
The next generation of CPUs by Intel, and the next revision of the current one, will both use faster RAM, but that’s DDR4 rather than just a clock bump, so those sticks wouldn’t fall in that category anyway.
X99 (Haswell with DDR4) is due out end of year, and it will already use most of the gamut of DDR4 features (lower voltage, higher transfers, higher base frequency). DDR3 will probably survive for quite a bit longer given how few people in the desktop market will be in a hurry to jump to an interim chip like the X99, but as any new tech, you can expect it to depreciate the previous one.
If you’re thinking of side-grading, don’t bother. If you want more RAM and you can find a lower clock cheaper, don’t bother. If you want to upgrade and that’s the cheapest you found, provided it doesn’t have a bitching session at your other sticks, go for it, but good luck with RAM disparity, it ends in pain about a third of the time 