RAM, a component that is involved in every operation in your computer which makes it an important part of your PC build. In this article, I will tell you everything you need to know before buying a RAM.
Must Knows
When buying a RAM for you PC, there is stuff that simply can’t be overlooked. Below are the must-knows for buying a RAM.
How much RAM do you need?
You can be just fine with 8 GB of RAM. However, if possible, 16 GB is highly recommended; it’s what most people use. Just make sure that you don’t buy RAM below 8 GB; it won’t be very pleasant. There is also 32 GB, an option that is becoming more popular these days, especially for streamers, content creators, and people who work on multiple complex tasks simultaneously, a good CPU will be extremely beneficial in this case.
Some people need even more than that, if you are planning to get more than 32 like 64 GB or 128 GB, just make sure that your system supports it. And that takes us to our next point:
Compatibility
Compatibility, this is perhaps the most important thing when you are buying hardware; you don’t want to spend money on something you can’t use. You need to know whether your RAM is compaitable with both your CPU and motherboard or not.
You need to make sure that your RAM generation is supported. For example, if you were to buy a DDR 4 RAM then your motherboard must support DDR 4.
Also, make sure that all RAM specifications including speed, capacity, size, etc., are supported by your system, PCPartPicker might be helpful.
When it comes to size there are 2 main form factors for RAM, DIMM which can be found in desktops and SO-DIMM which is mostly used in laptops.
Do you need a fast RAM?
If you are using integrated graphics then you will benefit from higher RAM speeds. If you aren’t then you will need to know if the programs you use actually make use of faster RAM or not. A lot of software won’t benefit heavily from faster RAM.
Don’t mix RAM
Mixing different RAM modules or kits usually results in unwanted behaviour. If you want to upgrade your system, it’s better to replace your older RAM with a newer one (don’t forget about compatibility too). However, if you want to add more RAM modules without removing existing ones, then you need to do some research on your system and the RAM that you already have. There is a chance for this to work, it’s just not that high.
XMP
XMP is short for Extreme Memory Profile (and yes I know that Extreme starts with an E but Intel thinks X is cooler). It’s a technology developed by Intel in order to make it easier for you to overclock your RAM. First of all, we need to understand what is RAM overclocking.
When you buy a 3200MHz DDR4 RAM module you expect it to run at that speed, but that’s not what will happen. Your RAM will run at its default standard speed (2133MHz in this case) and in order to get it to run at the speed stated by the manufacturer you need to overclock it. We know that it’s weird, we say overclocking when we make a CPU or a GPU run over spec. But with RAM you need to overclock to make it run at the speed you see on the packaging.
As I mentioned earlier, XMP is a form of overclocking. By using an XMP profile, you can make your RAM run at the speed stated by the manufacturer instead of the standard one. Some RAM chips support more than one XMP profile which gives you more freedom in selecting the speed that suits you.
JEDEC is an organization that sets standard for memory speeds, all RAM modules will run at it until they are overclocked. For DDR4 RAM the default standard speed is 2133MHz, and for DDR5 it’s 4800MHz.
Is It Safe To Use XMP?
The short answer is yes if your CPU is compaitable.
Overclocking or enabling an XMP profile won’t damage your RAM, however it can damage the CPU if your RAM’s speed exceeds the speed your CPU supports. Why? Because CPU and RAM communicate via the CPU’s built in memory controller and that’s the part that gets damaged.
Also, you need to know that if your CPU is damaged because you enabled XMP, Intel and AMD void your CPU warranty. Even though XMP is an Intel-made technology and even though Intel constantly advertises it, it voids your warranty, how ironic.
XMP voids your warranty and damages your CPU so its better to leave it disabled, right? No, as we said earlier your CPU won’t get damaged if you run your RAM at a supported speed, and your warranty will still be valid as long as XMP didn’t damage your CPU.
Keywords
While you are reading reviews or scrolling Amazon you will encounter a lot of stuff that might confuse you if you don’t know anything about them. No worries though, we got you covered with the most important ones.
Timings: Timings are a group of numbers (usually four) that indicate delay between operations which means lower is better. Combining timings and memory speed will give you an idea about the performance you should expect. In some cases, a memory with lower timings and lower speed can be faster than a memory with higher timings and higher speed.
SRAM: It’s a type of RAM that is much faster, much expensive than the RAM we know. Most people don’t call them RAM, they know them as cache which is the memory that is built in the CPU itself.
SDRAM: This is the RAM that we all know and the one that we are talking about in this post, it’s actually a type of DRAM.
Bandwidth: It refers to how much data can be transfered from or to the memory at any given time. Combined with timings and speed, bandwidth gives you an idea about the performance of your RAM. Think of it as a water pipe, the wider the pipe (bandwidth) the more water you can get through it together, the speed of that water is RAM speed.
