Upgrade system ram from DDR2 to DDR5 big difference?

My Motherboard will not use more than 4 gigs of ram.. BUT.. I was thinking about a way to cheat this.

I understand every time you go up from a DDR rating say from DDR1 to DDR2 with 2 gigs of ram.. its really like you are getting a 3 gig stick of ram if it were still rated at ddr1.

This is how the DDR thing was explained to me.

So If I have DDR2 now with 4 gigs.. and swap that for 4 gigs of DDR5.. wont that be like getting something like 6 gigs of ram effectively work/power wise? (like having 6 gigs of DDR2)

Hi there
unless you are an inveterate gamer you'll hardly notice a difference in DDR2 / DDR5 RAM.

For 90% of "typical Users" the performance of your machine will be dictated by the speed of the HDD's.

Slowish Hard disks are usually always the cause of poor performance - assuming you have a decent amount of RAM in the system.

Getting an SSD will pay much better dividends in performance than upgrading your RAM to DDR5.

If you get an SSD put the system page file on this too. You don't need to have the OS on this drive BTW as once the OS is loaded Windows doesn't need to load a lot more. Putting the paging file (and any Photoshop etc Scratch / work files and database indexes on an SSD will speed up your system NO END).

Cheers
jimbo

What jimbo45 said :)


I would add, that RAM speed will not help very much at all, if any for gaming.

If you are building a complete new PC, then YES, go with DDR3.

If upgrading you current system so it can use DDR3, in hopes it will speed things up, then NO. you will be sadly disappointed.
You will likely not see any real gain in a real world situation.

not to mention, if your board only supports DDR2, then you can only use DRR2 modules. Depending what you have, you may be able to replace them with 2x2Gb of faster.
A few boards will support both DDR2 and DDR3 .. but as stated above .. the diff is not much in real world use.

Quantity of ram will make a bigger difference than speed. 16 GB of DDR2 @ 1066MHz will outperform 8 GB of DDR3 at 1333 MHz and cost less than half as much. Use what you'd save to buy a SSD large enough for the OS and a couple games and you'll end up with a much faster machine for the same money

Thats true only IF you use applications that are very heavy on RAM use, Multiple VMs etc.

For the most part 4Gb is plenty for most people,
and those who use heavier RAM use apps 6-8 is typically enough, although true some will have exceptions and need more.

generally speaking most will never need more than 4-6

Wishmaster said:

generally speaking most will never need more than 4-6

"640K is more memory than anyone will ever need" - Bill Gates

Three absolutes that have held true since I built my first gaming computer in the 80s

The operating system will expand to fill all available storage media.
Everything will require more memory after the next update.
Attempts to fully utilize available resources inevitably result in the need to increase available resources

That won't work as already pointed out, memory is board specific. But when it comes to performance CPU speed is still king I don't care what anyone says.