Did my RAM downclock?

[Jayce]

I had a gig of Corsair Valueselect RAM. After adding a second gig I didn't find much difference in speed.

I just went into bios, and if I was looking at the right thing (something under DRAM Configuration) The top feature was listed as "200 mhz."

Did my RAM downclock? Isn't it supposed to run @ 400mhz? Or is it 200mhz per side or whatever that is?

How about this for a blunt question... Going from 1 gig of ram to 2 gigs of ram, would I notice a speed increase? Or would I just notice my system being able to hold open a LOT more programs than before? Maybe that'll answer some confusion to me...

 

[Amd64Boy]

well heres the answer to the second question....... well many computers get faster due to the RAM because the computers and OS dont have as much trouble holding all that temporary memory built up by programs. So if your computer had trouble holding programs before than yes it will make it faster but if the 1GB did enough for your computer then no you wont notice a difrence

 

[Flanker]

Yea, more RAM makes things load faster because the CPU can take in more stuff at one time and load that. So with 2GB you're loading and unloading twice as much stuff as 1GB. I don't know if that means twice as fast load times, but theres certainly an improvement.

DDR400 RAM runs at 200MHz. The "DDR" stands for Double Data Rate. That means that the ram can carry out an instruction on the rise of the clock cycle as well as the fall of the clock cycle. So effectively, its doing 2MHz for every REAL 1MHz of your RAM. So like I said, DDR400 RAM runs at 200MHz, but it is EFFECTIVELY running at 400MHz. If you made a chart of the clock cycles in one second, there would be 200 million of them, thus 200MHz. But because it can carry out 2 instructions per clock cycle, that gets doubled to an effective 400MHz. We don't call it 400MHz because thats...wrong. Instead we call it DDR400.

The correct way of saying the speed of RAM is by the PC---- designation. DDR400 would be PC3200. That way theres no confusion.

 

[Jayce]

I have noticed that my computer can hold a LOT more programs and not lag a single bit.

Hell, I had counterstrike loaded, ms picture it, about 37 music videos downloading, on and on, and in CS I didn't lag a single bit. Overall, I opened every program I could with my computer, even had spyware and virus scans running to bog it down. But I still didn't lag a single bit, granted I was only able to suck up 1.3 gig worth of the memory, so I still had roughly 700 megs free.

I figured that my computer was just "that" fast before, that adding more ram didn't make it noticably faster... I have noticed though, that I can load more programs and not worry about it bogging down. Then again, it didn't bog down much when I had 1gb of ram, but regardless I have noticed that.