PC Performance Memory Does It Worth Upgrading

PC Performance Memory Does It Worth Upgrading?

How important is memory? Sure, RAM is one of the cheapest, easiest to install and generally most effective upgrades you can make to a system, but should you even bother?

And if you do decide to upgrade, is it worth picking faster memory over the bog-standard stuff, and should you be picking your memory based on latency, capacity or operating frequency?

So many options, and so much conflicting marketing…

It's not as if recent releases have made things easier to understand either. The majority of Haswell motherboards support memory speeds up to 3,000MHz, and the memory manufacturers are falling over themselves to release DIMMs at this speed, which may have you thinking that frequency is important once again; that there's a noticeable difference between these super fast DIMMs compared to the stock 1,333MHz sticks that the latest platforms support by default.

On the other fence, however, is the notion that memory latency is much more important, and that you should always go for the fastest latencies you can fi nd. Of course it isn't as simple as that, because the time it takes for the memory to respond to a request is linked to the speed at which the memory is operating. Even so, the theory goes that you should spend more to get memory that has faster latencies wherever possible.