PC Building Beginners Guide: Memory
This PC Building Beginners Guide aims to offer core information regarding motherboards, Intel CPUs, memory, graphics cards, power supplies and solid state drives. It will hopefully become a growing archive of everything you need to know if you are new to PC building – especially if you are looking to build your very first gaming PC!
PC Building Beginners Guide: Memory
PC memory is becoming nice and cheap, which is great news for PC building enthusiasts. The important things to consider when choosing memory is brand, the amount you’ll need, the number of memory sticks, motherboard support, memory speed, voltage and latency.
Brands: Like with the motherboard section of the PC Building Beginners Guide, choosing a brand of RAM really boils down to personal choice and requires your own research and budget considerations. AMD, Corsair, Kingston and Patriot for example are all reputable brands, but these all really offer the same thing. Others are specifically dedicated to gaming and this will be obvious by the packaging.
PC Building Beginners Guide Memory (image: www.bit-tech.net)
Number of Memory Sticks: Currently, 8GB of memory is really all you need to run almost all current-gen games, but it never hurts to have a little more if you can afford it. It’s just important to note that more RAM will require more power. You also need to ensure that your motherboard supports the amount of memory you wish to install. More RAM is generally required for tasks such as intense video-editing.
Motherboard Support: What is important is to consider is whether your motherboard supports single channel, duel channel or even quad channel memory. Duel channel, for example, means using a matching pair of memory sticks in two different slots. Your motherboard will also specify the total amount of memory you can have installed.
PC Building Beginners Guide: DDR3 Memory Overview
Memory Clock Speed: This is the most important factor that will determine the performance of your RAM. Simply put, the higher the number, the faster the memory. 3000 MHz will perform significantly faster than 1333 MHz, for example.
CAS Latency & Memory Voltage: Things get a little more complicated here and really only concerns those wish with to partake in some memory overclocking in the BIOS. But basically put, the lower the latency, the better. Currently, most memory is DIMM and DDR3 – leaving you with the luxury of merely needing to choose your memory brand and memory speed (measured in MHz).
PC Building Beginners Guide – Useful Resources:
This PC Building Beginners Guide continues in 3 parts below. I hope you found this particular one useful and I welcome any questions!
