What is Random Access Memory (RAM)? How does RAM work?
Alright so now let’s talk about RAM which is Random Access Memory. Now RAM is a temporary storage location, Now which means if you turn off your CPU anything in RAM is going to disappear it’s going to be gone now the point of RAM is to store data that needs to be readily available to the CPU or the computer.
So it can very quickly be accessed and very quickly be changed so any programs that you’re running on your computer will utilize a small amount of RAM or if you’re talking about something like Google chrome a large amount of RAM because they’re going to be storing all of their program data in RAM.
So it’s very quick to access now this is in contrast to something like an SSD or a hard drive which is going to be a much slower storage medium but is going to be persistent meaning when you turn off the computer the data on there is going to stay, it’s not going to be deleted. Let’s talk about what you want to look for when you’re looking for RAM.
RAM has many different forums you have DDR2 RAM, DDR3 RAM, and DDR4 RAM and one very important thing to note is that laptop RAM is different from desktop RAM. So you cannot put laptop RAM in your desktop RAM slot, that’s not going to work, so just keep that in mind I’ve known many people who have accidentally bought the wrong type of RAM, anyways the main kind of I guess types or generations of RAM that we have right now is DDR3 RAM and DDR4 RAM now.
Types of RAM
DDR3 RAM is a much older style of RAM that’s probably a red flag if you’re buying a computer if it has DDR3 RAM you’re going to prefer DDR4 RAM, sorry which has a much higher kind of stock speed now when we’re looking at RAM, we have all kinds of speeds anywhere from something like two six megahertz uh to something like 3200 megahertz or 3600 megahertz.
Now the RAM speed doesn’t matter a ton for most of you but if you are building your computer then you want to go with a higher RAM speed rather than a lower RAM speed now ideally the sweet spot is probably going to be around 32 to 3 400 megahertz for your RAM but for most of you you’re not going to have that option and you’re not even going to see that speed if you’re buying a pre-built computer so in terms of the amount of RAM for most of you you’re going to want either 8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM
Now you could get 4 gigabytes of RAM if you’re going with a very entry-level computer but just keep in mind that this is going to be an entry-level computer it’s going to be slow it’s not going to be the most preformat so I would recommend as a minimum for most people unless you’re really on a budget eight gigabytes of rent now 16 gigabytes is going to be the sweet spot.
This is a nice middle ground you rarely need more than 16 gigabytes and again for most of you you’re going to want that amount now some of you may be saying well can’t I get 17 gigabytes the answer is no you need to have a certain denomination of RAM it’s going to be a power of two so either two gigabytes four gigabytes eight sixteen thirty-two sixty-four one twenty-eight that’s just how RAM works you’ll see some weird computers that have like six gigabytes of RAM.
Don’t worry about that that’s kind of an exception to what I’m saying for most of you again you’re going to want either eight or 16 gigs now if you are doing anything that is going to require more RAM you have a high-end CPU you’re doing video editing maybe you’re rendering a bunch of stuff then you may want to consider going up to 32 gigabytes of RAM.
If you’re doing machine learning AI a ton of data processing and you need that loaded for the models you probably might want to go up to 64. Now on my personal computer, I have 64 gigabytes of RAM. I have never needed to use that amount the most I’ve probably ever used is like 32 gigs.
Even that again like 32 gigs would be completely fine for my computer now one kind of random rule of thumb here that I’m going to throw in is that if you have a very high-end GPU so something like a 30 90 a 3080 a titan then you’re going to want to have double the amount of RAM than your video memory now I’m going to talk about video memory in a second but if you have 24 gigabytes of V-RAM you’re going to want at least 48 gigabytes of RAM which means you should probably go to 64.
I won’t talk about all the reasons for that but just keep that in mind in case you’re getting a very high-end GPU so now let’s move on to the motherboard now the motherboard is going to be the bridge or the connection between all your different pc components so your graphics card your CPU your RAM all of that is going to go directly on the motherboard and the way they’re going to communicate is through the bus on the motherboard.
Now the motherboard is also going to deliver power to the components unless the components have their own separate kind of power connection anyways the motherboard is important but for most of you, you’re not going to have to pick it out or even look at the specs because it’s just going to come with whatever computer you buy if you are building your own computer do some research.
I’m not going to talk about a ton in this video it is very important that you pick a motherboard that’s compatible with your CPU your amount of RAM and all of the expansion cards you may want to add and other features like fan headers uh and like extra USB ports and stuff like that now your motherboard will also have the input and output devices so it will have USB ports on it.