Hello i find that as i look throught the forums i get parts to some answers and confusing answers to questions i didnt know existed, In short Im confused. I like to think i am a fairly competient Pc user and know a lot about hardware but ram has always stumped me.

While its all well and good taking your current ram into the shop and asking for the same type, building a system from scratch is......... not so easy. I have built 3 systems and known exactly what i was doing in all respects except the ram. Basically i found the right type and speed, and hoped for the best. So far, i have been lucky.

Can someone please sort me out and tell me how to know for sure if a particular strip of ram will work in any given motherboard. what is timing? how is density a factor? what is the correlation with the motherboard clock and ram clock? is latency a factor when talking about compatibility? buffered or unbuffered? ECC? Voltage? i have a milion questions but i dont know which ones are relevant to determining if the (any) RAM will work with the (any) motherboard.

I ask this now because up until this point i have been using fairly inexpensive parts to build half decent machines, but now i wish to make a sizeable upgrade to my own personal system and if i buy the wrong ram it could be very costly. Please understand I dont just wish to be told what ram is right for me I want to know how i can look at any ram specs. and any motherboard specs. and know if they will work together.

Thank you

Angel

Hi 4ngel, welcome to the PC Help Forum.

In this day and age with the motherboards and ram we have out there...there's not much you can really break.

DDR1 will only go in a DDR1 motherboard regardless of voltage/mhz
DDR2 will only go in a DDR2 motherboard regardless of voltage/mhz
ECC registered is server grade memory which is designed for different things...more expensive and no use for desktops.

If you have 2 different speed latencys, they will run at the slower speed and not cause any issues.