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so i ordered 2x2gb of corsair ram for my laptop and its clocked at 800mhz , so what i was wondering was will it be a large improvement from my 3gb clocked at 300mhz, i play ram intensive games so i would expect a improvement but will it be a great improvement? ps its ddr2 |
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For memory, the clock speed has very little impact on actual performance. More memory will do much more than faster memory, especially in the DDR2 range. During the DDR1 and PC133 days, memory speed had a major impact on the performance of some games. |
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Won't make a huge difference. People add RAM because the computer seems to go slow as it has to use the page file located on the slow mechanical hard disk rather than RAM. More RAM simply gives applications less need to use the hard disk. You will probably notice more speed increase going from single to dual channel memory where you use 1GB RAM in one slot, adding an extra GB to another slot enables the computer to utilise the extra bandwidth and gives you lower delays from only having one stick of RAM. I've got a computer running on DDR2 ram & another on DDR3. The DDR2 ram is stated as being slower & I'm sure it is, but it's not enough to go 'wow, that's a lot faster' where on the other hand the bottlenecks such as faster hard drive & faster processor or graphics card do have significant changes you can feel. |
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In today's computers memory access is the biggest bottle neck next to hard disks. It can take upwards of 100s to 1000s of clock cycle to fetch data from memory. with that said a computer can generate 1000s of clock cycles in less than a 1/1000 of a second. But if you keep hitting the memory your processor will slow down significantly. There is a reason why processor cache was invented. I'm in the boat that yes memory speed makes a big difference. But like anything you need to look at the cost. If you can get slower memory for significantly cheaper then go for it. |
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I think the biggest difference is not the MHz speed specifically. There's more difference between DDR2 and DD3 memory. Dual Channel is very important, and above all the timings are extremely important. Often the CPU won't pull a lot of data from the RAM, rather it pulls smaller chunks of data scattered all over the memory cells. In that case the transfer speed (MHz) is not as important as the access speed (CAS latency). I lowered my clock speeds so I could tweak the timings and it had a huge impact. |
