GTX980 vs 970 and DDR3 1333MHz vs 2400MHz

[Deon van Zyl]

I POSTED THIS WITH AN OLD THREAD TITLE AND NOW I CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO CHANGE IT. ON TO MY REAL QUESTIONS:


My Macbook Pro Retina went down last week and I was in a bind to finish an edit so with an hour's research I went down to a local PC store and bought myself the following:

Intel Core i7-4790 (Intel HD4600 graphics)
MSI H97 GAMING 3 Motherboard
Transcend 8GB 1333MHz
Samsung 840 PRO 256GB SSD

I had an old case lying around at home so I slapped it together and I was up and away. I ended up not getting 32GB of ram and a graphics card there and then because I have a friend that can order parts through a distributor. I intend to order the rest of my build tomorrow which would include: GTX980 or 970 and 3 x 8GB 1333MHz bringing us to a total of 32GB ram.

My questions are:

- What type of real world difference can I expect going GTX980 vs 970?

- is 32GB ram overkill?
I am quite happy with my Macbook's performance (When it is firing on all cylinders) and am really only expecting 25 - 50% more power from this desktop. I am aware that a bunch of REDusers that work in post productions are utilizing 64gb and up but I don't plan on upgrading any of the components in this PC and would expect bottlenecks elsewhere before filling up all 32gb of ram...

My Macbook specs:
2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz)
16GB 1600MHz memory
512GB PCIe-based flash storage
Intel Iris Pro Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB GDDR5 memory

Thanks
D

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

More Ram is never overkill.

 

[Eric Bowen]

GPU acceleration especially with R3D media is a ram hog. 32GB of ram is absolutely where you need to be especially with the 900 series cards.

 

[Deon van Zyl]

Thanks Eric and I hear you, Jared.

I think I'll be going 32gb ram and GTX970.
I would rather save some money now and not get the 980 so I can sooner upgrade to whatever Nvidia comes up with towards the end of next year.

cheers
D