Does Ram effect preformance?

[Blackmoore]

Will generic ram, slow down, or effect to preformance output of a computer and its components? For example if I put in two generic 512 MB Sticks of PC3200 in a maching running an GeForce 6800 Ultra, will it cause the graphics card to preform slower? Reason I ask is because I have a fairly decent CPU and Graphics Card, and I am wondering if my generic ram is having a bad effect on the other components in my machine.

 

[Apokalipse]

yes RAM does affect the speed of your computer
RAM is where everything is 'loaded' so it affects all the loading times and retrieving information from anywhere
Corsair spend time to get higher frequencies out of their memory, and to reduce the latencies along the way. Kingston do also, their HyperX RAM is designed for speed
basically, Generic RAM is not very good because all they do is just put it together without researching anything, it is not designed for speed, it's just made to be plain RAM
this is fine if speed is not important to you, but for the gamers and servers and such it is advisable to go with better RAM

 

[Nubius]

Yes you will notice a few extra FPS sometimes when games if you have better RAM or also if you're increasing the amount of RAM you have. It's like apokolipse said though, they go out of their way to highly design and perfect the high performance series whereas value ram is just guaranteed to work at it's normal pace. Technically the high performance RAM is faster only in terms of nanoseconds but still when it comes to absolute top gaming performance you want high performance RAM. I'm sure you'll notice a little boost in speed in your computer if you make the switch from value to XMS or HyperX

 

[chadley]

I agree to a certain extent but you gotta look at the cost!
Super duper Corsair RAM is around twice the price of generic RAM but you won't see twice the performance!

 

[mlr]

got to agree with chadley there if you can afford to go out and blow that kind of money on new ram when you already got it then go for it,but considering the results you will get is it realy worth it for a few extra fps, i got standard pc3200 512 ram and its at 215 fsb used mem test to search for errors and its fine

 

[TheMajor]

Harddrives are also very important when it comes to loading/writing speed. When working with large amounts of data, such as recording video, the HD is one of the most important parts. RAM is more important for the speed at wich the CPU can process data. Say u give the CPU a very resource hogging task (like converting video)... something wich requires millions and billions of calculations then RAM will be very important since CPU's are usually faster... expensive high-end RAM such as Corsair XMS will have less trouble keeping up with the CPU.

Also very important: if you are short of RAM the OS will use the HD for storing lots of data in a pagefile. in this case a fast HD is very important.

(How does this sound? )