RAM performance

I've been configuring laptops on xoticpc, just trying to figure out what to buy etc. and doing this had led me to discover that not only does ram come in different amounts but at different clock rates (or is it called something else? :/) like you can have 8gb of 1000mhz ram or 8gb of 1300mhz ram. Whats the difference performance-wise? and then there is also DDR3 or DDR2 ram (altho ddr2 I've only seen on pretty old laptops). And then I remember that the whole DDR thing is also part of GPU's.. Help? I'm confused

 

1300 MHz RAM will run faster than 1000 MHz RAM, and will be noticeably so in benchmarks, but since RAM is rarely the slowest part of your notebook, in real world applications, you're almost certain not to notice a difference. DDR3 and DDR2 are 2 different generations of RAM; DDR3 is the newer generation, and allows for higher speeds and more memory bandwidth ( Synchronous dynamic random access memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, down in "Generations of SDRAM").

GPUs generally use GDDR3, GDDR4 (which are both based on DDR2) and GDDR5 (which is based on DDR3), which are specially designed versions of memory optimized for the much higher bandwidth requirements of graphics cards specifically. There, due to the nature of the way graphics cards work, bandwidth actually becomes much more important, and the speed will matter a bit more.

Of course, with the advent of integrated GPUs, the speed of "regular" RAM may come more into play, but that will still probably be generally capped by the bandwidth of the memory controller rather than the speeds of the RAM itself.

So, in the general sense, if you're talking about regular system RAM, then no, the speed generally won't matter as much (as long as your computer supports it), and DDR2 or DDR3 will only matter in terms of which your computer has, as you'll have to match the same type (DDR2 SODIMMs have 200 pins, DDR3 SODIMMs have 204). In terms of GPUs, the RAM they use (if not an integrated GPU), is generally soldered onto the board itself, and you again don't have to worry about it except in terms of how fast it lets the GPU run... and at that point, you're picking things based on the entire GPU, and not just it's memory, so I'll avoid confusing you by adding in the issues of memory bus widths and such-like.

 

+rep to Judicator for an extremely accurate, well-informed post.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-upgrades/517924-cas-latency-bandwidth-4.html

this is an ongoing conversion about latency and freq. if your going to upgrade your ram when you fight buy it. I recommend that you look online first. It might be cheaper to just buy 8 gigs of ram from newegg amazon zipzoomfly. I would also recommend using googling shopping search for any item you buy online. It has beat or matched any other price search engine 99% of the time. I frequently find better deals on google shopping search for nearly everything. I found the Motorola hx1 which is 120 bucks in best buy for 40 bucks and that was cheaper than amazon and newegg too.

Now back to topic. It all depends on how much you want to spend and what u are doing. As i said earlier you would want the best latency if you do tasks that use lots of ram and use small files. lower latency will speed up the response time more on a low latency ram in that situation. Also if your doing programs with large files dumped into ram than ram with a higher freq and bandwidth would be faster. Although all these benefits are almost completely arbitrary. you would have to have a huge exaggeration to one end or the other to physically notice a difference. The main thing really comes to price. I found upgrading to 8gigs of ram costing on some sites more than it would to buy it online. So i recommend doing a little research. plus if you upgraded with your own RAM you buy you always got a spare becuase if you upgrade from the manufacture they will keep the other set of ram. With your spare set you could also try selling it on ebay to make a little money back too.

EDIT: lol i cant give more reps for the next 24 hours haha but good work judicator ^^

 

yes. you are much better off buying more ram than faster ram. but unless you are doing some serious computing anything over 4gb is overkill, at that point you are probably better off upgrading GPU or CPU, or to SSD.

 

I regularly glance at the RAM usage on the Coretemp widget I've got on my desktop. I can have Empire Total War, Dreamweaver with 20 pages, Excel with a 25Mb (100000+ very complex formulae), a dozen explorer windows, firefox with 50 tabs... and RAM usage has rarely topped 3Gb. (NOTE this is EXCLUDING RAM used for prefetching which can quickly gobble up all the "free" RAM but it's not truly occupied RAM since Win7 kicks that data out when a program needs it)

RAM speed is as said also a limiting factor in such a vast minority of situations. Except for when you run out of it and swapping slows your system to a crawl. (G51J with 1066MHz gets higher scores than G73 with 1333MHz RAM in a variety of CPU/RAM benchmarks)

What I would recommend though: if your lappy has 4 slots (e.g. G73, G51JX) and the upgrade isn't stupidly expensive, no harm in maxing out the number of 2Gb sticks. If your lappy only has 2 slots (e.g. G51J) it's not worth getting 8Gb until you KNOW you *NEED* it. 4Gb sticks aren't worth it, 2Gb kinda are.