Aurora R1 24GB-1333 vs 12GB-1600

Hello,

I have an Alienware Aurora R1 (Late 2009)with 6GB ram and the i7 920 CPU running at 2.67GHz. I've never bothered to OC it. The system was a Dell warranty replacement in 2010 for my XPS after 3 main board replacements. I bought the XPS in 2007 and it worked great until 2010 when the board died. The replacement lasted 2 days and the next was DOA so Dell shipped me a complete new Aurora R1 replacement. To date its been a great and reliable system. The only issue was the GPU died last year so I replaced it with a EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC 2GB. I have 2x2TB and 2x3TB WD Green hard drives in it for storage.

This is a personal & work system at home, sees 8+ hours a day of use and is running 24/7. Main use is my daily desktop running Debian (stable) Linux with 2 24" Dell widescreens and a 46" Samsung Smart TV for displays. I run 6 virtual workspaces spanning the 3 displays. Typically have 6-8 projects on the go leading to about 100 browser tabs and 20 or so additional programs/apps running. The only gaming I do anymore is WOW, raiding a couple evenings a week, *if* I manage to get some free time. I use this system for image editing of RAW files as a hobbyist photographer. The biggest draw on the system would be VirtualBox VMs used for OS, software and network testing.

Currently I can run 3-4 VMs (2xMS, Linux & FreeBSD) along with everything else and the system is fine for a day or so before the VMs need to be shutdown and restarted. I'm at the point where I need to be able to run 6 and I'd prefer to not have to restart them every few days.

I'm currently building a FreeNAS system to upgrade an aging fileserver. Combining the costs of the new hardware and 12x6TB NAS drives I'm not in a position right now to build a new desktop. At this point I'd like to simply upgrade the Aurora R1 to last another year or so before replacing and re-purposing it.

I do run out of memory due to the VMs mostly so adding more RAM is needed. My choice seems to be either 12GB or 24GB of 1333MHz or 12GB of 1600MHz. Is there really any large benefit of going with the 1600 over 1333 in my case? I was thinking of ordering 12GB of the 1333 for now and if I need more down the road I can still increase it to 24GB then.

Thanks