The amount of RAM you use has become a fairly simple choice. Unless you are
building on a very restricted budget, you just have to choose between installing
one gig or two. One gig of RAM is plenty for most modern operating systems
but all of them will run a little faster with two, it really comes down to a
financial decision. You might also choose to get one gig of high quality RAM
over two gig of lesser quality, especially if you plan to overclock. Some specialized
applications may profit from more than two gig of RAM, if you are planning
on using such, make sure you check that both your operating system and your
motherboard will accommodate the amount of RAM you have in mind.
Another thing to consider when choosing the amount of RAM for your system
is your graphics card. Most motherboard-integrated graphics chips and
PCI Express graphics cards marketed with the “Turbo Cache” feature will use
system memory to store information related to rendering graphics; this system
memory is generally not available at all to the operating system. On average,
these graphics processors will use between 64MB and 512MB of system memory
for rendering purposes.
The actual type of RAM you will need depends on the motherboard and
chipset you get. Some current motherboards use DDR (Double Data Rate)
RAM but the industry is increasingly turning towards DDR2 RAM. Chipsets
that use dual-channel memory require you to use two identical (in terms of size
and speed) sticks of RAM. Your RAM should usually operate at the same clock
speed as the CPU’s Front Side Bus (FSB). Your motherboard may not be able
to run RAM slower than the FSB, and using RAM faster than the FSB will
simply have it run at the same speed as your FSB. Buying low-latency RAM
will help with overclocking your FSB, which can be of use to people who want
to get more speed from their system.
If you are upgrading from an existing computer, it’s best to check if your machine
requires specific kinds of RAM. Many computer OEMs, such as Gateway
and HP, require custom RAM, and generic RAM available from most computer
stores may cause compatibility problems in such systems.
RAM has different bandwidths, ie 400, 533, 600, 733, 800, the current trend
is moving from DDR2-400 RAM to DDR2-533 RAM as it is faster. Higher end
models are very expensive.