Thread: What's the best memory (RAM) type?

  1. #1
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    What's the best memory (RAM) type?

    I'm planning on building my own computer and I have no clue on what memory type to buy. What are the differences between them? Are they all the same or are some better than others?

  2. #2
    Fingerstyle Guitarist taylorguitarman's Avatar
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    depends on what the rest of your system is.
    DDR is the new stuff that's supposed to work (theoretically) twice as fast utilizing both parts of a clock cycle. Catch is that the hardware has to take advantage of it. Many boards now will have both SDRAM and DDR options so it's really your pick. I'm not doing anything "bleeding edge" so I just have a ton of SDRAM (3) 256MB chips and it works fine. Just make sure to get brand name stuff.

  3. #3
    SDRAM is the most compatible, and has been the standard for quite a while. DDR is starting to take over, but you won't notice any big speed difference, even if you are a super gamer. You might if you are compiling a 2 hour compile time program though.
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    Linguistic Engineer... doubleanti's Avatar
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    minor sidetrack... what's the best brand for 133 SDRAM? mine right now are LD generic, and micron... [two sticks... one more to go... $63, $29, 15? ]
    hasafraggin shizigishin oppashigger...

  5. #5
    I don't really notice much of a difference. If I were you, I would just get the generic stuff, because of the price.
    What will people say if they hear that I'm a Jesus freak?
    What will people do if they find that it's true?
    I don't really care if they label me a Jesus freak, there is no disguising the truth!

    Jesus Freak, D.C. Talk

    -gnu-ehacks

  6. #6
    Linguistic Engineer... doubleanti's Avatar
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    that would make sense, that's what i've seen in practice too... especially since all my ram always works forever anyhow... there was some fuzz about silver/gold [or copper, i think] contacts and erosion differentiated by brand, but i don't recall who they were or what/when the problem was...
    hasafraggin shizigishin oppashigger...

  7. #7
    Scourfish
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    The best ram available is in a twenty five thousand dollar SGI box. A top of the line SGI box can render nine billion polygons/second, and that's with some special memory attached to the machine.

  8. #8
    train spotter
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    Watch the cheap RAM.

    I lost 15 years or 6GB of stuff last month when my 512Mb DDR stick went bad.
    I thought it was my hard drive and tried to back up, that just corrupted all my files.

    All my code libraries have unreadable characters ect. Still trying to fix them.

    So better to spend the few more $ to get EC and name brand.

    No-one has mentioned RAMBUS. Is that because it was killed in the price war or because it never lived up to the hype?
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  9. #9
    Linguistic Engineer... doubleanti's Avatar
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    my... lost source? losing mind? my...
    hasafraggin shizigishin oppashigger...

  10. #10
    A Banana Yoshi's Avatar
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    SDRAM I'd think.
    But, no big deal!
    ------------------------
    Engineer223
    Yoshi

  11. #11
    Registered User alex's Avatar
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    Hi!

    Which type of memory to choose is one of the least important questions for most PC users:

    1- the gamer. Modern (usually 3d) computer games are rated by their frame rate, which depends most heavily on the speed of the rendering engine on the graphics card used. Communication with the graphics card is limited by the AGP bus, not the speed of main memory. Hardcore gamers will therefore upgrade the graphics card one or two times in the lifetime of their computer. The 512Mb 133MHz SDRAM sticks are very cheap, so they usually prefer loads of memory, and turn off virtual memory completely.

    2- the M$-Office-user. The amount of memory is important, because Windows/Office tries to cache every single DLL it loads in main memory, even if it's not used anymore. Since the Win32s API was introduced, every proces get it's own copy of each DLL, while the old 16 bit API in Windows 1/2/3 shared at least the code segments en resource data between processes. But, as most of this memory is only accessed very infrequently, less memory combined with a fast harddisk (and a large, static swapfile for virtual memory) is also an option.

    3- users that use large datasets, for example high resolution pictures, or data from MRI scanners, or the data gathered by the Hubble telescope. Analysing such data sets is fastest if first of all the dataset fits in main memory, and the main memory is as fast as possible. Programs used for those things are highly optimized to read from main memory in large bursts, so memory latency is unimportant. Those applications are not usually ran on PC's, but if you had to use PC hardware it would definitely be a Pentium4 with RAMBUS memory at this moment.

    4- the programmer. Compiling large project can be very slow... Best is to have loads of memory (for diskcaching, if you are using Windows you should change the ridiculously low upper bound of 4Mb) and a harddisk with very small seektime. (Windows 3/95/98 commits all changes to disk after exactly 4 seconds, effectively disabling disk caching if your build takes more than 4 seconds, I have never found a way to disable this behaviour and I don't know if newer versions have the same problem: I switched to linux... gcc was about five times faster than the Intel/bcc32i compiler, and the code ran a bit faster too, on my PII/233MHz@300)

    My conclusion about memory types: RAMBUS is the fastest memory type (available for PC hardware at least) in raw speed, but the latency of RAMBUS is much higher that the latency of SDRAM and it is also much more expensive AND you have to buy a Pentium4 which is also very expensive. So unless you have very specialized/optimized applications for working on large data sets in main memory: you can get as good performance from cheaper system. (As soon as the data is retrieved from disk, this will be the bottleneck, in that case one should buy a fast harddisk, not fast memory.) The raw speed as well as the latency of DDR memory is slightly better than SDRAM, and it is only slightly more expensive. If you buy a mainboard which supports DDR, buy DDR memory. If you can find a much cheaper mainboard which satisfies your needs, use it to buy a good 7200rpm harddisk instead of a cheap 5400rpm version.

    Hope this helps...

    Post your choice of components, your budget (and how strict your limit is ) and which applications you plan to use on it. You'll get feedback if you make an "obvious" mistake. Make it clear about which components you would like feedback, or everyone will give a prescription of his/her personal dream-machine!

    alex

  12. #12
    A Banana Yoshi's Avatar
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    I think I will wait until some big size mem card comes out
    Yoshi

  13. #13
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Critical SDRAM and DDR is supposed to be the best at this time.

  14. #14
    Linguistic Engineer... doubleanti's Avatar
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    what is critical SDRAM? [forgive me, i'm a bit... say two years... out of date... still having a PIII 450, and being 'cutting edge'...]
    hasafraggin shizigishin oppashigger...

  15. #15
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    It's just a brand name. Nothing special expect it is supposed to be the fastest. That will probably change by the time I finish writing this, though...........

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