what do ram timings mean?

[watchinthewheel]

i have been looking at an upgrade for my pc and i find it have hard to work out all the figures ram has to describe it. i understand the mhz speeds but what difference do timings mean, for instance is 5-5-5-10 good? and also whats does the pc2100/3000 or whatever mean and last but not least whats does ddr266 or ddr 333 mean? i know what ddr stands for but i have no idea about the rest.

thanks in advance for any information.

 

[meansizzler]

When you look for memory it usually has a name like "DDR400 PC3200", where DDR400 means the max rated speed of the memory "200MHZ/400MHZ in Dual Channel Setup", and PC3200 means the transfer rate "3.2GB/s", look at your motherboard manual for the max speed of memory you pc can handle...

Also when you see memory specifications it has numbers next to it eg. "3-3-3-5", these are known as Latency Timings, the lower the numbers the faster the memory...


Trusted Memory Suppliers... Crucial, Corsair, Geil, Kingston, Mushtek, Patriot, OCZ....by from these names only....

If you need to know what memory is in your PC, you can run this program..CPU-Z


More info

http://www.centon.com/faqmemory.htm#q17

 

[watchinthewheel]

hey, thanks a lot, thast just what i wanted to know. so 5-5-5-10 isnt that good then? thast odd because those timings are from an ocz gold ddr2 set

 

[Pezerinno]

DDR2 memory typically runs much looser timings due to the high HTT speeds attainable.

What speed are you running at? Often memory can do tighter timings than their stated default. You may be able to increase voltage to allow tighter timings. PLEASE read up on it before doing this though as it can cause instability, memory failure.

 

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

All the memory questions are answered on wizd's memory faq. Best off its easy to understand.