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Buying memory can be quite confusing, especially when you plan on overclocking. Shoes breaks down all the numbers so you understand what to look for.  A lot of this information has been covered in bits and pieces in our previous articles, but here you will find it all nicely put together. So then, let's start out with the basics shall we? RAM Random Access Memory. All computers have RAM. As far as gaming goes, it is a member of the big three in terms of performance influence (Video card, CPU, RAM). Plan on loading games up fast? Plan on having anything running in the background of your games? Yes? Then choosing the right amount and kind of RAM is very important. So what exactly is RAM? RAM is a form of temporary storage in your computer. Just like a human's short-term memory, it doesn't take a lot of time or thought to pull up information that is stored there. When your CPU calls for information from your hard drive, it is first transferred to the memory, where is will be able to be fed to the CPU at much faster rates than if it were coming directly from the disk itself. To illustrate how the whole thing works, let's see what happens to the memory when you push the power button on your computer: 1.You get that screen that has all those numbers on it, maybe an energy star logo, usually it goes by too quick for you to read any of it. That screen is called the POST screen. POST stands for power-on self-test. In this stage, the computer recognizes all of the hardware in your computer, including the RAM. It quickly checks each address in your RAM to make sure there are no vital errors in the memory chips themselves (this is why you sometimes can see a bunch of numbers being counted up to 1024 or 512 or what have you).
2.The operating system is loaded into the system memory; not the whole thing, just bits of it. This allows the CPU to read the information and tell all the other computer parts to do their jobs in bringing you that lovely windows startup sound and screen and all that good stuff. 3. As your computer is running, bits of frequently accessed information are constantly stored in the RAM. These bits include crucial operating system files that allow your CPU to instantly access to the entire OS should it need to. 4. When you load up a program, whether it be an Internet browser or a game, the information is transferred from the hard drive to the RAM, where it is again accessed by the CPU. When you save a file or beat a level or anything to that effect, that data is sent to the RAM, and then sent to the Hard driver's cache buffer where it is eventually written to the disk. For more information about how RAM works, click here. For more information about how Hard Drives work, click here. For more information about how CPU's work, click here. Capacity Quite simply, the amount of information your RAM can store. The more RAM you have, the more information your CPU can access at very fast speeds, and the more responsive your system will feel. So, with more RAM comes higher speed. Well kind of, the caveat is that there is definitely a point where having a lot of extra RAM is not going to make any kind of positive difference at all. Unless you are a power user, meaning you use multiple programs that each require large amounts of system resources, you probably don't have use for over 1GB (1024MB) of RAM (yet). In the future, we will probably see operating systems, not to mention games, using up a great deal more RAM than they currently do, so 2GB (2048MB) of RAM may not be a bad idea for those looking to future proof. Speed Definitely the stupidest naming scheme of them all. Whoever decided on these labels should be shot. I mean, they have like 3 different numbers that all mean the same thing? What gives? But I digress, each label actually does add its own little piece of information about the specs of the RAM. So let's take a look at each one and what they mean: (note: using the permanent fixture on Newegg's “Top 5 Sellers”, Corsair Value Select, as an example) PC 3200 I'm actually not sure what the “PC” means in this case, but the “3200” is how RAM manufacturers are telling you the transfer rates of your memory, in this case 3200MB/s. That's a lot of information. That's a lot a lot of information. DDR 400 DDR stands for Double Data Rate. There is really nothing special about this. Basically all system RAM you see today will have DDR in the product description. It simply means that there are 2 transfers of data per clock cycle. 200 MHz For all intents and purposes, this is really the most important number to consider when buying RAM. It is the actual operating frequency of the RAM. The other numbers are dependent on this number, not the other way around. It is also very important when it comes to overclocking, which will be discussed later. How they all go together Starting with 200 MHz. Each clock cycle consists of 2 data transfers, so in double data rate RAM, the effective clock speed of the RAM will be 200 MHz times 2, which is 400 MHz (DDR 400). From there, each transfer consists of 8 bytes of data, so 400MHz times 8 bytes is 3200MB/s (PC 3200). Now on to the more advanced part |
Saturday July 4 2009 | |||||
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