6GB DDR3-2200 (faster) vs 12GB DDR3-1600 (more) in OC LCS system

6GB DDR3-2200 (faster) vs 12GB DDR3-1600 (more) Overclocked Liquid-Cooled System

I know when considering this kinda thing, you need to ask yourself if 6 GB of RAM is enough? Because if it is not and your gonna be swapping with hard disk virtual memory, then you absolutely should have went with the larger capacity slower RAM.

The dilemma is, 6 GB may actually be enough but I'm not positive. I am a power user... the rig is not for gaming, but for work: 1-2 instances of Visual Studio, SQL Server 2008, 10-20 browser tabs, several Windows explorers, Outlook, other applications, etc.. I'm upgrading from a 4 year old dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz workstation with only 3 GB of RAM and Visual Studio is dragggggging slow working on our large development solutions (but I tend to believe this may be mostly from having my OS partition on the same hard disk mirror as my Development data partition).

The G.Skill Ripjaw RAM that I'm intersted in states that you only get that stated speed on 2 dimms. I talked to them on the phone, and it seems that you will get the speed with 3 dimms too in the case of triple channel. But if I were to populate all 6 dimm slots, the 2200 RAM would be under-utilized at about 1600 speeds (so I would have been just as well off going with the slower 1600 from the beginning).

Not knowing the realistic speed difference between 1600 and 2200, and if I'd appreciate the difference is the problem. Perhaps someone could shed some light here?

I will be picking up the i7-980 hex core as soon as it comes out this month, slapping it on a GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD7, water cooling it in a Thermaltake Armor + LCS Liquid Cooled Full Tower, and hopefully running it somewhere between 4 - 4.5 GHz.

Win7pro will be on a Crucial RealSSD C300 (SATA III SSD with 355 MB/s read speeds). My development data will be running on a OCZ Z-Drive m84 (PCI-Express RAID 0 stipe of 4 SSDs claiming 750MB read 650 MB write).

So any opinions? Do you think I'd be better off with 6GB DDR3-2200 (faster) or 12GB DDR3-1600(more)?

for the things you are using your computer for the more ram the better. Even if you were able to run the 6gb at 2200mhz that increase is a. not THAT noticeable and b. not enough to warrant its purchase. 12gb is your best option

You aren't likely to notice the difference between 1600 and 2200 without looking at build times or benchmarks. Check the memory usage on your current box, that'll give you an idea what you will need.

Personally i would buy 6gb of 1600, you'd going to pay through the nose for 2200 without any noticeable performance gain.
Then if it turns out you need more, you can just buy 6gb more 1600.

yea go with more ram