How do I buy ram

LewieP

So I would like to buy some moar ram, since it's a nice easy upgrade, and looking at systemrequirements.com, ram seems to be the main thing stopping me from being in recomended spec for alot of games (I have 1gb atm, and quite a few games want 2gb).

Now, I know very little about ram, other than if I use DDR2 ram, I need to get more of the same. I downloaded and ran CPU-z, and all it tells me is that I have DDR2 and 1024mb of it. I know from having looked inside my (prebuilt) system that it's on one stick.

Now, scan have some fancy corsair ram at a decent price, £27.24 for 2x1gb sticks.

From the site's description -

The Twin2X2048-5400C4 is a 2048 MByte matched pair of DDR2 SDRAM DIMMs. With Heat Spreaders...
675MHz at the low latencies of 4-4-4-12.

Is this good to go with my system? Do I need to find anything else out to check?
Also, the ram in there will be bog standard ram, I vaguely remember hearing that if I have one stick of slow ram and one stick of fast ram, both will operate at the same speed, is this correct? and if so, will removing the current stick be the best option? Will 3gb have much better performance than 2gb?

I duel boot XP and Ubuntu if that matters.

Cheers!

fogeyman

It's usually not a good idea to mix RAM timings--it screws things up since the different RAM sticks are operating at different speeds. But then, I have friends who mix sticks of RAM with no issues. I just prefer not to.

Also, 3GB won't perform significantly better (possibly not even noticeably better) than 2GB of RAM. Given time, it might, but games are only just starting to reach that 2GB limit.

DekuStick

fogeyman wrote: »

It's usually not a good idea to mix RAM timings--it screws things up since the different RAM sticks are operating at different speeds. But then, I have friends who mix sticks of RAM with no issues. I just prefer not to.

Also, 3GB won't perform significantly better (possibly not even noticeably better) than 2GB of RAM. Given time, it might, but games are only just starting to reach that 2GB limit.

I have 3gb. Well I used to have 4 but I gave one gig to a different computer because it just isn't worth it yet. 2gb will do you just fine. 3gb is like future proofing.

Ravenger

Hmmm... it depends on what you WANT for you system, just how "good" you need it to be. Corsair has a reasonable reputation, although I use offbrand RAM right now with absolutely no problem, so it's basically whether or not you want the best of the best. Secondly, as for the 4-4-4-12 numbering, that is essentially the time that it takes for the RAM to be accessed and be used with the computer. The lower the numbers, the better, but the larger the size of RAM on the stick, the slower the timings will be. imho, 4-4-4-15 or 5-5-5-15 is perfectly reasonable to use as well.
Next on your list was the fact that it was a 2x1 GB deal. That means 2 sticks, 1gb per stick. Since you already know that your current 1GB is on one stick, its safe to get another 2 1gb sticks. As for the heat spreaders, basically they do just that-dissapate heat. They aren't necessary, but it's always nice to have.
Lastly, the 675mhz is something I would avoid, but that's just me, because I play lots of games, and I want to have reasonably high-end parts in my computer, so I play with 800mhz sticks. While they are more expensive, they are also faster, and not terribly expensive (as long as you dont go buying 2gb sticks, those are just insane, 150$ per stick).
Do you need to findo ut anything else? Well, just make sure that the memory can fit on your motherboard. For example, if you look here
http://img113.imageshack.us/my.php?image=imgp1075fj0.jpg
You can see that I have 2 sticks of memory in my computer( I apologize for the unecessary size of the picture, but it's the only one I have uploaded that I can think of which suits my needs atm =\) If you look next to my heatsink, you will see the sticks. That is the size for a 240-pin memory stick, make sure that if you are going to buy memory, that they will both have the same number of pins, otherwise its more than likely that your new memory will not be compatible with your motherboard.
Oh, and I almost forgot; no, do not remove your old memory, 4GB is SO much faster than 2gb, Im assuming that since you are tripleing your RAM, you will have a slightly better result. One last thing(geeze, i keep saying last thing.. sorry =\) make sure that your current OS will actually be able to utilize 3gb of ram. I know that if you get vista, you need 64bit for the computer to utilize i think it was over 2gb of ram. I'm not sure about what the deal is for XP, I would advise looking that up for yourself.

I hope you find this info useful, a lot of it is opinion-based and whatnot, so make sure you look up stuff for yourself