How to upgrade the memory on an ASUS Rampage III Extreme Black Edition

Bob wants to know his options when it comes to upgrading the RAM on his ASUS Rampage III Extreme Black Edition.

Question by Bob from Canada | Answered by in RAM on

I am currently running Corsair Vengeance memory (CMZ24GX3M6A1600C9) on an ASUS Rampage III Extreme Black Edition motherboard with an Intel i7 990X Extreme processor and 2x ASUS GeForce 680 DC2T 2GD5 GPUs (C7CVCM099279).

I want to upgrade my memory to something that would make my build somewhat faster but still stable, and I wondered if you may have some advice and possibly a better set of DDR3 memory modules to recommend?

I just installed a new CPU cooler, Cooler Master V8 GTS, and I do not have much room as far as height leftover between the top of the DIMM and the fins on the radiator for the CPU cooler. I am not a "Gamer" and not looking to overclock ridiculously. I am just looking to get the "Best and the Fastest" performance out of my build.

I am a graphic artist, website designer/developer, programmer, and photographer, and I utilized just about all of Adobe's software. I do a lot of rendering of images, which I am interested in bettering the performance of my build for. I am looking for a quicker system overall. Can you advise me at all? Thanks, Bob.

Hi Bob,

Great build! I had a similar setup when X58 was first launched!

How to upgrade the memory on an ASUS Rampage III Extreme Black Edition 1

First, as you know, you've already limited yourself with the choice of CPU cooler, giving you a height restriction, and second, DDR3 may be harder to come by these days as vendors are already preparing DDR5 production for 11th Gen Intel and Ryzen 6000 series. That said, the secondary market may be perfect for you and will save you some money.

I can't promise you will get any more performance by changing your memory, but considering you are currently running 4GB at 1600MHz and the number of Adobe apps you are using, it's worth a shot to upgrade speed and capacity. Top-end speed is going to hit 2400MHz, but ASUS hasn't qualified any kits to run in a 4 DIMM configuration, which is where we will gain the capacity we want.

If we drop down to 2133MHz, there is the GU34GB2133C9DC kit from Geil; it has been tested to run across four slots, so picking up two of those kits will get you 8GB of 2133MHz. Optionally, you can move down to 2000MHz and pick up the ADATA AX3U2000GC4G9B-DG2 kit; this is 8GB at 2000MHz, so you could grab two and have 16GB, which should be a massive improvement over your 4GB currently. On the downside, you'll need to swap your CPU cooler because the height restriction will certainly come into play.

I hope this helps!

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