My question my be simple, but I haven't been able to find an answer myself yet.
If you had the choice of getting either 24 GB of ram at 1333 MHz, or 12 GB @ 1600 MHz, which would you choose?
I know latency is more important than frequency, but I'm not sure how latency and frequency compare to the overall capacity, especially when the capacity is doubled at the lower frequency.
Could somebody that is more knowledgeable in this area help me figure out which would provide better performance?
Differences in memory frequency generally have almost no measurable effect on performance in real world situations. I'd take the doubling of memory any day.
The difference comes from whether you need more resources, or faster resources. If I needed to run more at once I would pick more memory any day. If I knew that the application I was running would never use up my full amount of available memory, I would choose frequency.
It's not really a fair comparison: the price difference between 1333 and 1600mhz RAM will be nowhere near the price difference between 12 and 24GB (which is usually around double).
You will likely not notice the difference between 1333mhz and 1600mhz RAM, and I fear that you won't see the difference between 12 and 24GB of RAM either.
Higher frequency may provide a slight immediate boost (<5%) as long as you don't need more memory. These days, 12GB is quite comfortable and unless you run memory intensive application (virtual machines, databases, large multimedia editing) you likely won't benefit from the added RAM.
Really just go with 24GB if you know you need it. Otherwise 12GB @ 1600mhz is a safe bet.
