...How much did you spend on RAM alone?

A little over 160 euros, which I think works out to about $200. That's not counting the costs of the cooling fan and magnetic fan-filter.

I... hate to break it to you, but I think your money could have been allocated a little more wisely.

Believe me, I checked to make sure if that was the case, but PC-components always suffer a price-bump when they get to this side of the pond mainly because of an infuriating practice among manufacturers where they will take the US-price and substitute the dollar-sign for a euro-sign, rather than actually adjusting for currency-values. Long-term campaigning has gotten them to back of on that slightly but those improvements are much more noticeable in the bigger European nations with larger consumer-bases like Germany, France and Great Britain; or in the more technology-oriented economies such as Belgium and Sweden.

I on the other hand, live in a country so small it could easily fit inside of Germany twenty times over, and whose economy has historically been all about trade. We still get fucked.

TLDR: parts are more expensive here than they are in North-America, and this legitimately was the best deal I could get by a decent margin. My only alternative would be to import, and the odds of components being dead-on-arrival multiply by a disconcerting margin the second that international shipping gets involved (also the added costs of international shipping would negate most if not all of the savings).

Oh, jeez, I didn't know there was a large tax on this. I didn't actually know where you lived.

What I was talking more about, though, was the choice for 2133MHz. What I was trying to go at here was that you could have gone for something clocked a bit lower, gotten around the same performance, and either saved money or reallocated it somewhere else.

Really sorry to hear about the import tax though. I've never had to live with it, but I know countless people who have and... It really, really does suck.

Import taxes actually only make up about 30% of that price-bump: the rest is all just the manufacturers jacking up the price cause hey! What are we gonna do about it?

And yeah, I know the faster RAM-speed is a pretty small upgrade for most people but this machine ain't just about gaming: it's also about efficient multitasking, and fast RAM can make a more notable difference there.

Case in point: I am typing this reply in one of several tabs open in Google Chrome. Specifically, one of 79.

That's not counting any other programs I have running (even though I'm running like half a dozen simultaneously).

So yeah, I'm that rare weirdo who legitimately benefits from hi-speed RAM.

I know that high speed memory can have benefits but... No, sorry. Browsing in Chrome isn't a stress test that would actually see major improvements from memory speed within reason. The only time you're going to see improvements is when you're rendering video or some similar task while passing huge amounts of data through a single CPU at once across all threads. Chrome isn't really a stress test by any margin.

Now, 16GB, sure, that's all fine and dandy, I have that myself. But... I don't think you would have seen any difference with 1600.

Also it's not 2133MHz, and I have no idea why so many manufacturers brand it as such. It's DDR3-2133, which is actually clocked at 1066.5MHz.

It's not so much browsing Chrome that needs that speed: it's closing it. If you've set Chrome to saving your tabs so that it automatically re-opens them next time you boot it up, then closing so many tabs at once puts a big-ass strain on your CPU and memory (with my previous computer I actually never closed Chrome if it had over 35 tabs open, because it would just crash the whole PC).

And while this PC won't render much video (I do my editing on my iMac), I do intend to record HD Let's Play's of games at high settings while talking in Skype video-calls. So I think it can still make a difference, albeit certainly not the biggest.

I absolutely agree that for most people DDR-2133 is not a worthwhile investment, but in my case I think I qualify for some of its benefits and seeing how I got this at a 5% discount, it was actually not much of a price-difference anyway.

That's not at all your memory limiting the speed at which you close Chrome, that's your hard drive. The bottleneck isn't getting the data out of memory, it's writing it to disk. That's where your performance improvement lies, not in the speed of your memory.

Memory speed isn't going to affect that whatsoever. Capacity definitely will, but speed at any reasonable number today will be just fine, you don't need bleeding edge for that.

I don't know if it's the taxes or what causing your difference to be small, but over here you'd be paying about double for such a clock increase.

The taxes and such are a small part of it, yeah, but now that DDR4 has finally been released DDR3-2133 isn't exactly bleeding edge anymore. I've noticed price-cuts in high-end DDR3 across the board ever since DDR4 hit the scene.

hold up! how the hell do you have a computer with power of Hercules combined with Perseus, but half as many fans!? my computer-building friends would be jealous as fuck of your skills if they read this.

Half as many fans? As in, your friends' computer have 10-12 fans?

1) No computer on Earth needs that many fans. Either your friends don't know how to design around their PC's internal airflow, or they ought to switch to water-cooling.
2) If those friends need to make some quick cash then let me know cause I know a few supervillains on a first-name basis and those friends of yours sound like the people to call if you need a weather-machine.

I should also note that in my original count I did not include the fans in my GPU. If you include those, the number goes up to 8.

But to give something resembling an actual answer: a big part of PC-thermals revolves around picking a case with good airflow and designing your system around that. Make sure that none of your airstreams clash with each other and that they always flow from one fan to the next & stick to the golden rule of PC-airflow: from the front of the case, to the CPU heatsink+fan, to the back of the case. I've also got one fan blowing in from the side, whose airstream leads directly into the suction of the fans on the GPU, and a fan on top whose airstream passes over the RAM before getting sucked into the CPU-fan and out the back again.

Besides that, here's a few basic tips to keep in mind:
- Fans, like any part of your computer, can be overclocked to work harder. You'd be surprised what kinda cooling you can get with OC'd fans (and the noise is still less than that of 10-12 fans).
- Make sure your fans are as unobstructed as possible. For example: I've got a lot of hard-drive cages at the front of my case, directly next to the front intake-fans, but I space out my drives so that they impede the airflow as little as possible per fan.
- Cabling, cabling, cabling. Nothing impedes airflow more than shoddy cabling, and there is no cheaper way to reduce your PC's temperature than just spending some extra time and getting your cables neatly bundled and zip-tied behind your motherboard tray.
- Get a good 3rd-party cooler for your CPU. Don't use the one that comes in the box with the CPU itself. My cooler cost me like 20 bucks and it is a massive improvement over the stock version.
- Make sure your GPU has proper cooling. My R9 280 comes courtesy of MSI, and while MSI admittedly has shitty customer-support this is one of their Twin FrozR series, which is series of video-cards specifically designed to have better cooling (and come with software that lets you OC the fans in the GPU itself).
- Fans can only cool your PC if the air they suck in is cool, so make sure that the room you're keeping the PC itself in is kept is nice and cool as well. Also use filters to keep out dust & hair (if you have a pet and that pet is anything other than a reptile, fish or invertebrate, you need a filters on your fans) and make sure the PC is kept on a smooth hard surface and not carpet or something similar.

Hope that's useful to at least somebody, be it you or your friends.

well, individual computers they have usually 6 or 7 fans. but it would take two of their most powerful computers combined to have that much RAM and CPU. which was why I was so surprised.

but that said, these friends make computers out of junked computers. they take scrap and frankenstein it together. also, the cables are all a jumbled mess all the time.

I so have to share this info with them. they'll appreciate it. and perhaps I'll be able to do something with it, as well.