DDR PC3200 - Exactly How Does This Work And How Will An Upgrade Help ?

By Steve M Lobston

Memory or RAM is a piece of hardware in your DDR PC3200 that stores software applications your working on. It serves as short-term working space between your computer's hard drive and CPU.

Why add memory to my computer?

Adding memory will help your DDR PC3200 performance. Mainly, it will improve opening new applications, running multiple applications at once, and switching between software applications (multi-tasking).

How does additional memory enhance performance?

One task that further memory speeds up is opening a new software application. Let us take this as an example. When you open a new application on your DDR PC3200, the computer's CPU brings the application from the disk drive and holds it in RAM memory. It holds it in RAM since RAM is very fast compared to the hard drive. As soon as RAM gets full, and you open a new application then the CPU is required to remove one of your open applications, place it back on the slow hard drive, get the new application from the disk drive, and position the new application in RAM. Quite simply, it switches the applications.

This game of replacing wastes time. Ideally, your pc could have an infinite amount of RAM. Then your CPU would get an application once from the disc drive, load it into RAM, but not need to boot out a different application. There is no such thing as infinite RAM, but you can max out the RAM on your computer by adding the maximum amount of memory to each socket. So the more RAM you have the better !.

More About DDR RAM

DDR RAM is an acronym for double data rate random access memory, which is a temporary storage device, enabling fast access to data. DDR RAM functions twice as efficiently as its predecessor SDRAM, as it transfers twice the data at any given time utilizing the same clock speeds. This way, it effectively doubles the bandwidth available to the processor and the entire computer sub-system as well as transferring twice the amount of data. DDR SDRAM is available in four different clock speeds. DDR-200 runs at 100MHz, providing a bandwidth of 1.6GB/s and is also known as PC-1600. DDR-266 runs at 133 MHz, also known as PC-2100, giving 2.133 GB/s bandwidth. Next in the series is DDR-333 that runs at 166 MHz, called PC-2700 and gives 2.667 GB/s bandwidth. The last one is DDR-400, which is also called PC-3200 runs at 200 MHz, providing 3.200 GB/s bandwidth.

DDR RAM is delivered in different storage capacity such as 512 MB, 1 GB and the latest one 2 GB. DDR Ram of 1 GB is widely used by consumers due to easy availability and affordable price. What's more, a computer has four RAM slots in which a user can place four 1GB DDR RAMs resulting in faster processing for complicated applications. 1 GB capacity is satisfactory for most animations, games, video editing, and other multimedia applications. It also makes it possible for the user to open multiple windows at any given time without reducing computer speed. - 32198

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