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You may have already heard the term prefetching as a computer science term. Some RAM protocols also come in low voltage or ultra-low voltage options to give you more choices.
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If your motherboard supports voltage changes, you may have a broader range of RAM to choose from, but when in doubt, select RAM that follows the restrictions of your motherboard. However, it’s essential that the voltage of your RAM matches that of your motherboard. Higher-voltage RAM will also produce more heat. VoltageĪs a general rule, the higher the voltage on RAM, the better it will perform (within a generation, of course). Most likely, as DDR5 begins to reach everyday consumers, this will also be the case. When the current DDR4 RAM capabilities came on the market, they were too expensive to warrant purchasing over DDR3 RAM for most everyday users for some time. For example, if you have 32GB of RAM at 2400 MHz, it will, in most cases, work better than 16GB of RAM at 3600 MHz. More RAM will almost always be better than faster ram. However, do keep in mind that DDR4 RAM will almost always be faster than RAM from any previous generation.Īdditionally, keep in mind that the size of your RAM makes a difference, too. However, in its simplest terms, the faster the speed of your RAM (in MHz), the more functional it will be. The bandwidth of your computer is calculated using several different parameters. We’ll delve deeper into each of them below. Some of the stats, like bandwidth, can almost double from one generation to the next, while others, such as voltage, still improve, but suffer from diminishing returns.Įach of the parameters we mentioned in the table above has a different purpose. If you look at the table above, you’ll see that every iteration of the DDR protocol sees significant performance increases over the last generation. The Differences Between DDR3, DDR4 And DDR5 Additionally, it will take a while longer for Intel and AMD to release motherboards that will support the DDR5 protocol. While the technology for DDR5 RAM is available today, it’s only been developed by a handful of companies. While DDR4 is the most common RAM now, you may still see some functional computers that use DDR3 RAM. Of course, we’ll only genuinely be concerned with DDR3, DDR4 and DDR5 RAM in this article, as the other RAM protocols are functionally obsolete for gaming.