Introduction

The demand for four gigabytes of memory has risen with the release and adoption of Windows Vista amongst the enthusiast audience. Thankfully the prices have also dropped considerably since the days of XP.  Vista changed the outlook for many people as it can make far better use of memory than XP, SuperFetch for example preloads the most used programs into memory for faster access. This coupled with memory prices dropping has made four gigabyte and above configurations attractive in reads to both price and performance.

On our test bench today we have two 4GB kits from Crucial and Corsair. The Crucial sticks aim to give us additional memory at a very attractive price whereas the Corsair modules aim for class leading performance. We have tested each set throughout a number of tests in order to establish how much of a benefit each gives over a standard two gigabyte configuration.