question about ram.

[chesman]

i was just surfing the web, looking at some ram with my friend, and well we came to the conclusion that we don't fully understand all the abreviations on the ram.

example, this is the thing we were wondering about.

all ram is designated such as this:
pc166, pc333, pc800, etc...

what is this? cause it is not the speed of the actual ram, so what is it?

thanks guys

Ches
have a great day

 

[Soloman02]

yes, that tells you the frequency, or "speed" of the memory. So if you had PC800 memory, that means that it runs at 800 Mhz,. meaning it processes information 800 million times per second.

MHz
One million cycles per second. Used especially as a radio-frequency unit. Also called megacycle.

 

[Jorsoft]

All of that "pc[insert random # here]" just tells you what speed that the memory is. The high the number, the faster its speed. With faster speeds, it can handle more data more quickly. Check if its SDR, DDR, OR RDR as well. SDR is the older, really cheap stuff (usually pc100, 133, or 166), while RDR is is pretty fast (pc 800+1066). , but really expensive, is designed to work only with P4's, and is pretty much obsolete now. DDR is the good stuff.Its fastest stuff (pc3200+3300, etc) is faster than RDR and quite a bit cheaper (I've seen it for as low as $70 for a 256MB DIMM).