ram info

[manodivx]

can anyone explain the differences in the ram or have a website about it? im tryin to find the big diff between ddr, sd, rdr and like the speeds, 100, 133, 2000, 2100, 3000 and so on. if anyone can give me the info on which is the fastest( best performance) any help is welcomed


mano

[droolian01]

As far as i know, rambus and ddr are incompatible - that is you wont find a mother board that can take both types. There are motherboards that take both ddr and sdram, but this is irrelevent.

Just choose your cpu and mobo, then use the memory that it takes, simple. sdram is old, ddr(double data rate) sdram is the updated version of sdram. Most(if not all) old mobos that take sdram will not be able to use ddr sdram, but as i said some (a very few usually the budget ones) new mobos are 'backward compatible' and take both - athough i think that old sdram is probably DEARER than ddr sdram so no one would ever want to stick sdram in a new mobo.

The numbers on sdram refer to the fsb (front side bus) speed that they run at. The much bigger numbers on ddr sdram refer to the BANDWITH of the memory (see below links)

Rambus is memory that is designed exclusively for pentium 4.

Read some of these, especially the first 2:

http://peripherals.about.com/library/weekly/aa021300a.htm
http://www.templeoftech.com/articles.cfm?ArticleID=50&PageID=1
http://www.kingston.com/newtech/ddrbandwidth.asp
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1493/
http://www17.tomshardware.com/mainboard/00q4/001030/
http://www.sysopt.com/articles/memory/

P.S. i don't know that much myself - and when i have the time i will be studying the first 2 links carefully myself!!

Hope this helps a bit.

[theReal]

I guess the most common RAM right now is PC2100 and PC2700 (for AMD systems, I don't know much about common Intel systems). Like Droolian said, SDRAM is old and you should only use it for old systems that were made for it.

PC2100 (the Double Data Rate "equivalent" of SDR PC133 RAM) it is made for 133MHz frontside bus and runs at 266MHz

What becomes more and more common is PC2700 RAM - it is almost the same as PC2100, only it can run at 166MHz Frontside bus (and therefore has a double data rate of 333MHz - that's why it is also called "DDR333").

The newest is DDR400, which can run at up to 200MHz FSB, but I think you don't yet find any boards that officially offer that memory speed. However it is good for overclocking the FSB.

For good RAM performance, it's also very important to buy high quality RAM that is rated for fast timings (CL2 not CL2.5). Not every RAM is still running stable when you set the bios to the fastest memory timings, but if it does, it's worth it (quite some percent faster at the same frequency).