RAM n00b question

[Fatboy]

I'd appreciate some info on the following if possible:

The highest "supported" speed ram I've seen, even on the newest mobos is DDR400 (PC3200 right?), but looking around (window shopping ) I've seen PC4200 DDR memory (DDR533?) and even higher for the DDR2 memory.

Does this mean that if DDR400 is the highest supported, that anything higher would have to run at this speed, or is the higher speed stuff purely for overclocking your system?

Also, what is the difference between DDR and DDR2? Would DDR2 be compatible with my mobo, which stated a max of DDR333 (PC2700? I think I'm getting it)

Cheers again.

[yamangman]

RAM with higher BUS speeds basically means room for overclocking, or running the RAM at lower speeds (running 533MHz at 400Mhz) means you can decrease the CAS latency, resulting in faster speeds. It allows system with a high (overclocked) processor front side BUS to maintain it's BUS speed ratio (components run at fractions of the speed of the CPU BUS).

DDR2 RAM only runs in motherboards which support DDR2, for example, all PCI-E platforms.

[Mblaster]

The higher speed ratings of DDR are for people that want to overlclock. At default settings no DDR motherbaord/CPU runs faster than PC3200/DDR400.

The DDR 2 memory will not be compatible with your motherboard. They are only compatible with the newest Intel motherbaords. I can't remember whether the DDR2 modules run at higher than 3200 default.

DDR2 is the new version of DDR memory that will allow us to get much higher speeds, (DDR800 first qtr 2005, from hexus front page ), but they run at higher latencies. So DDR 400 is faster than DDR2 400.

[Fatboy]

Gotcha, I think... I haven't messed around with memory as yet, just messing around with my CPU mostly.