Now that the chipset fiasco is over, it’s almost a given that if you are building a new system, it should be based around Intel’s Sandy Bridge line of CPUs. They took a flying leap in performance over the previous generation, with little to no movement in price. Even at the sub-$200 price range, where AMD had been holding its own for a while, Sandy Bridge is the way to go.

The question is, which memory kit should you buy if you are putting together a Sandy Bridge system? SB motherboards will use a default setting of DDR3 1333, but using XMP profiles, speeds up to DDR3 1600 MHz and higher are supported. If you have some older non-XMP DDR 1600 MHz laying around though, it may not be a good idea to use them. These products were never intended to be run alongside Sandy Bridge processors, and are often specified to use higher voltages than these CPUs can handle. It is recommended to stay below 1.65v when adjusting memory voltages on Sandy Bridge systems, and considering the way various subsystem voltages relate to each other on the CPU itself, it would be wise to heed this caution. So that 1.80v kit you have may not run at full speed on your shiny new Sandy Bridge PC.

Thankfully, memory manufacturers have responded to this, and most of them offer dual channel memory kits specifically designed to be used in enthusiast or high end Sandy Bridge systems. We have gathered kits from five of the most popular memory companies, to put together this guide on how to choose the best memory for Sandy Bridge.

The Contenders

We will only be looking at 8GB kits today; by now 4GB is considered a ‘bare minimum’. First, let’s take a quick look at how they compare on paper:

At first glance, very little separates these modules from one another. All are priced within $5 of each other, and all offer a lifetime warranty (which comes in handy down the road, if you plan to push them beyond their specs). However, a closer look reveals that there are some slight differences in specs. For instance, Patriot is the only one that will run at CAS 8 right out of the box, without any overclocking. The rest are CAS 9 parts, with the exception of the Crucial kit which runs at CAS 10. As we’ll find out though, CAS latency may not have the impact on performance it once did.

Another thing to look at is XMP voltage – if a kit requires 1.65v to run at 1600 MHz, you are already at the wall you may not want to pass. This may leave very little room for overclocking or tweaking of the timings.

Here’s an overview of the other SPD timings used by each kit. For details on what these mean, refer to this Wiki.

Timings are all pretty equal, the only exceptions being the lower tRFC of the Patriot memory, and the higher tFAW of the G.Skill kit. We’ll find out later whether this affects performance.