Questions about RAM

[FeignFeign]

so i have been doing some research on variety of different stuff such as processors, graphics card etc lately (i am making my first computer, if you havent seen the thread).

But i still dont quite understand RAM and the RAM's speed. How does the hierarchy of RAM exactly work? for example when you look at a processor, intel pentium quad core is higher then pentium duo core and duo core is better then pentium 4 etc. How does that work out on RAM?

 

[Pck21]

First off, you should be asking this is the RAM forum. Second off, when you say RAM "speed" do you mean the timings or the actual MHz that the RAM is at? Basically the higher the number of MHz, the faster the RAM processes, much like a CPU. Timings are a completely different animal...

 

[2048Megabytes]

I look at the PC rating of RAM to determine speed. The PC rating of memory is an estimate of the transfer rate. Say for instance a RAM module is labeled PC2 6400 (also could be labeled as PC 6400). The 6400 is an estimated transfer rate of 6400 megabytes per second.

However, if the RAM is put into dual channel mode the effective speed is doubled. Dual channel random access memory uses two modules of memory to increase the data path from 64-bit to 128-bit to allow a greater transfer of data from RAM to the memory controller.