An informed gamer understand the importance of fast RAM to power their video games. System memory is the third most important component of your PC which directly affect the performance of your computer during a game-play. Performance cannot be achieved just with CPU and GPU, without a fast ram your system will outperform and result poor performance from these components, so for achieving the best out of your invested processors, go for a higher memory.
Number of Slots for Installing System Memory in PC
By default the standard motherboards for desktop computer has four slots for installing the memory sticks, while the gaming notebooks contains only two slots due to being a smaller size platform. Secondly the memory modules are platform dependent i.e; RAM module for desktop can not be installed in a laptop computer, similarly the reverse is also not possible.
Selection Criteria and Standards of RAM Technology
System memory should be selected based on it’s timing and speed, while the communication channel standard these days is DDR3, whereas the DDR2 and DDR are older variants which are no longer used in modern PC machines but you can find them only in older models.
DDR stands for Double Data Rate which was the first in this class released in 2000
DDR2 was released in second quarter of year 2003
DDR3 was released in the year 2007 and still in use for newer computers.
So How Much System Memory to Install in Your Computer?
This is probably a very hot topic for discussion in the gaming community in order to find out the right amount of RAM for higher performance gaming machine. The straight-forward answer is at least 4GB, it could be a single module of 4Gigs or two memory sticks of 2GB each. These days computers use Windows 7 operating system, which consumes minimum of 1GB RAM, so this much amount of system memory gets occupied by win 7. But when we talk about a gaming pc, then it should not be enough, you should understand memory is third most important part of your gaming machine, so you should spend money as much as you can to get maximum speed out of your machine. From a modern realistic HD gaming point of view, one should install at least 6-8GB of high speed RAM and recommended to install only in two modules in first two slots.
In 2013 new gaming computers must contain at least 8GB of system memory to get the maximum performance while playing video games.
The maximum limit of a memory depends on your motherboard and processor, now-a-days you can find motherboards supporting 16GB RAM, while more advanced motherboards for extreme speeds will support up to 32GB of memory. The above recommendation is based on the fact that this amount of ram is sufficient for getting a realistic speed for better control of your games.
Recommended RAM Modules For Video Gaming
You can find many products under the computer category that are built to deliver fast computer speeds, but there are some memory technologies specially built to meet the needs of gaming rigs, based on the research the following are top 5 RAM to be used in a gaming PC.
- Corsair Vengence
- Kingston Technology HyperX
- Crucial Ballistix Sports/ Elite
- G. Skill Ripjaws Series
- Corsair Dominator