by ZaAndrei Zaharia

Created on: May 01, 2009   Last Updated: May 02, 2009

Apart from being one of the most important pieces of a working computer, RAM is also one of the hardest hardware pieces to comprehend. RAM stands for Random Access Memory. It is the hardware piece that stores files temporarily until the computer uses them. Whenever you load your operating system it loads on the available RAM space, same goes with applications and diverse software titles. A long time ago, well in computer years, DDR RAM came into the main stream. DDR stands for Double Data Rate, referring to the ram speed. This is no longer the standard today, as we are quickly moving into a whole new computer technology era.

Not a long time ago DDR2 was introduced to the mainstream computer user. It changed the whole new architecture of the memory. It doubled the speed that the RAM units spoke and received information from the other hardware. DDR2 came in different flavors, such as PC2-3200 (DDR2 400) all the way to speeds reaching 1066 MHz for the PC2-8500. The higher the MHz the faster the RAM modules are. The higher the clocks the smaller the cycle time, being about 3.75 nanoseconds for the 1066 MHz pieces versus the 10 nanosecond time for the 400 MHz ones.

When DDR3 came into existence, only the higher end gamers could afford it. Speeds on the DDR3 rose up to PC3-12800 being labeled as the DDR3-1600 modules. Nowadays PC3-17600 has hit the market with an impressive speed of 2200 MHz. In today's gaming, quantity still matters more than speed. But having low speeds on your RAM can really hurt the frames per second in a game or even the overall Windows/ Linux/Hakingtosh experience.

In my opinions, and I'm sure most of the people would agree, DDR2 is still the mainstream type. It is cheap, very effective, and doesn't bottleneck even the highest end processors and video cards out there! RAM timings also are very important when choosing the best RAM for your machine(s). These indicate the time in cycles of now a module peaks to other hardware pieces. The lower, or "tighter", the timings the better the speeds of the RAM will be. It is normal as the speeds of the RAM increase the timings will respectively. If you try to tighten the timings by over clocking, it will strain your modules, but speed increases are inevitable.

I personally own 2 Gb of Crucial Ballsitix Tracer modules of PC2-8500 or DDR2 1066 RAM. I cannot complain about the speed of these things, but for windows vista I would have rather had 800 MHz modules only at 2Gb a piece. Quantity gives more performance

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