How fast ram speed

Before you even begin looking at memory kits you should consider what your hardware limitations will be. As for how much memory you need to game, 8GB of RAM is pretty much the minimum these days and it should let you play most games without any problems. Adding any more memory on top of 16GB would honestly be a waste if you're just gaming. However, if you're working in a creative field like video editing, 3D model rendering, and creating other types of visual media, then 32GB or more memory would be useful.

You don't necessarily need to buy the fastest RAM either as it's easy enough to overclock your memory. Timings essentially denote the total number of cycles it takes for the RAM to send data. You can find the timings listed in the memory specs as four numbers interrupted by dashes such as "" and the first number usually denotes the CAS Latency—so it would be CAS 16 in this case.

The basic thing you need to know is the lower the numbers are the faster your memory is. However, you should also know that faster memory speed results in higher latency.

So you should also be wary of RAM that's incredibly fast, but throws in a lot of latency that negates it. Plus, adding better or more memory is usually the cheapest way to improve the performance of your rig.

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Table of Contents Show. It can be expressed in both MHz and GHz usually the former , and one Hz equates to one clock cycle per second. So, essentially, RAM speed is actually bandwidth. The higher the clock speed, the more data the RAM can transfer between components in a shorter period of time. Now that we have established that the RAM clock speed is essentially bandwidth, it becomes relatively obvious as to why having a higher clock speed would be a good thing.

That said, how do you determine the appropriate RAM clock speed without the fear of underspending or overspending on RAM? If the clock speed is lower than the minimum specified by the motherboard, the system could behave unpredictably — it could simply result in subpar performance, or it could lead to the PC refusing to boot up altogether. Keep in mind, that the right memory for your computer is the kind of memory it was designed to take.

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