Best RAM

id go with these personally:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231671

I dont know if that is your "not over the top price" or not though. But at least they will keep you going for as long as your PC ever needs DDR3 memory. DDR4 will start to become mainstream by the end of next year so you shouldn't plan on upgrading your memory ever again after this purchase until you are getting a whole new PC that uses DDR4.

 

Itherael is right, GDDR is different than system memory because it is optimized for maximum bandwidth rather than a compromise of latency and bandwidth with a heavier weight to latency. GDDR5 was created by AMD to give increased bandwidth to graphics cardsand was the next generation of graphics double data rate memory. GDDR5 is the first generation of graphics ram that actually uses more like quad data rate in how it functions compared to GDDR1-4 that were simply bandwidth optimized double data rate memory techs. It isnt called GQDR memory because it doesnt sound as nice and it is the next generation after GDDR4.

system memory DDR is double data rate memory, it is the standard of memory for all desktops right now but that hasnt always been the case. DDR is really only 10-15 years old or so. I believe DDR4 is still using the same double data rate type of technology, however each DDR4 dimm is it's own channel now. So four sticks of DDR4 = quad channel memory. Three sticks = triple channel memory, etc. You can only have as many channels as the CPU's memory controller allows of course but pretty much everything should support up to 4 channels right away. Server CPUs will probably go up to 8 channels. Each generation of DDR memory doubles the bandwidth available, so DDR4 has twice the bandwidth of DDR3 at the same MHz speed. DDR4 will also scale to higher MHz and uses lower voltage which means less power draw. The extra bandwidth combined with more channels will give significant advantages to future processors because everything is moving to "APU" style processors that integrate both CPU integer cores, floating point cores, and graphical compute cores into a single processor die. The compute cores right now are greatly starved for bandwidth, which DDR4 will solve for us. On the other hand, integer and floating point cores in the CPU side of things benefit more from lower latency and dont care about bandwidth at all really. Even single channel DDR-1600 is enough bandwidth for just about any CPU today. You may think you wont care then since you will never use the iGPU since it is so slow anyway, but AMD is paving the way for technology to move into the direction where the iGPU cores are simply additional cores in a processor and tasks better suited to run on those massively parallel cores will automatically run on the compute cores, and serial tasks or things that require low latency execution will be done on the integer or floating point side of the cores. When this type of computational design takes over the market (which it will eventually) we will need the much higher bandwidth because it will help the parallel tasks being done by quite a bit.


But right now there is nothing called DDR5 and I dont think it is even remotely theorized yet. Just in the minds of the creators as what the next thing will be called whenever it comes to be.