Both options have advantages and disadvantages. Buying all new RAM or sets of RAM usually costs more than adding to the existing RAM. It can on the other hand speed things up if you have a slow RAM module in your PC.

The first thing that you may want to do is to check the currently installed memory. Experienced users may know the answer to how much ram their computer has installed, inexperienced users on the other hand can use software to find that out. The easiest way under Windows is to press Windows-Pause and look for the installed memory (RAM) listing in the window that opens up.

But that tells you how much RAM is installed, but not the speed and specifications of the memory. A tool for that is the free software CPU-Z. It is available as a portable version at the developer website. Just download and run it. Switch to the SPD tab in the program. Here you find extensive information about each motherboard slot and RAM module. You see the general type (e.g. DDR3), the module size (e.g. 2048 MBytes), the Max Bandwidth (PC3-10700H) and the manufacturer. Those are all the information that you need to shop for additional RAM modules.

Depending on your motherboard you either need dual channel memory or triple channel memory. You find those information under Memory > Channels.

Lets say you have four slots of memory available, and the first two are occupied by two 1GB RAM modules. You could now make the decision to buy two additional modules to put them in the two unoccupied slots of the motherboard, buy a 2×2 Gigabyte set instead and replace the existing modules or go overboard and buy 4×2 GB modules instead.

If the RAM is old, it is usually better to buy new faster RAM. If you got the computer recently and need more RAM for applications and tasks that you run you may be better off adding RAM to the computer if motherboard slots are available for that.

Which leads to the following question: How much RAM is installed in your computer, and do you think that it is sufficient for what you do with the computer?

The free system tool RamMap can be used to display those information, and a lot more. The program is compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7, and not Windows XP. It is also compatible with the server variants from Windows Server 2008 on.

When you start the program for the first time you will see a tab based interface that displays information about processes, use counts, physical pages and a file summary.

Here is a short description of each tab:

• Use Counts: usage summary by type and paging list
• Processes: process working set sizes
• Priority Summary: prioritized standby list sizes
• Physical Pages: per-page use for all physical memory
• Physical Ranges: physical memory addresses
• File Summary: file data in RAM by file
• File Details: individual physical pages by file

The file summary tab displays the file data that is currently in the memory. When you switch to that tab you will see a large list of files with their paths, file names and memory information. You can click on a header to sort the table. A click on path for instance sorts by file path which is helpful if you are looking for specific files in Ram. You could also look at the biggest files in RAM with a click on Total, Standby or Active.

Why can a file listing like this be helpful? You could for instance use it to determine if certain files or programs use up a lot of memory when they are running. You could find system drivers or fonts that you do not need to see how much space in RAM they use. Could also be very helpful for software developers who need to analyze their program’s memory usage.

RamMap is more of a tool for advanced users. Having said that, it can still be useful for users who are not that tech savvy. Windows users can download RamMap from the Microsoft Technet website.

The PC that I want to build for instance has to be an all purpose PC. It should be able to run the latest games but it will mostly be used for work. The PC should be as silent as possible without running to hot. The operating system will be Windows 7 64-bit. It should support USB 3.0 which has been released some time ago and will become the new standard to connect USB devices.

I have decided to divide the article into different parts to be able to concentrate on specific hardware and why I have chosen them. We begin with the selection of the CPU, motherboard and RAM, the core components of a computer.

Build Your Own PC: CPU

PC users have a wide selection of CPUs. It basically comes down to the two manufacturers AMD and Intel who both produce processors for lots of different purposes. We are looking for a desktop cpu which means that we will concentrate our search on those. Top of the line CPUs are usually to expensive for their performance gain over the rest of the CPU lineup (unless you have the cash lying around).

This basically leaves two options: An Intel Core-i7, Core-i5 or an AMD Phenom II X4. It is now time to use the Internet or computer magazines to find benchmarks and reviews of those CPUs. You can use many hardware shops like Newegg, CPU Benchmarks or Tomshardware as well as many other sites for that.

You will end up with a few CPUs that would make a good selection: Intel Core i7-860, Intel Core i7-920, Intel Core i5-750 or AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE. The final selection now is not only determined by the performance but also the price and quality of the CPU. The AMD CPU is cheaper than all Intel CPUs. It’s performance is lower than the Intel CPU performance but it should be sufficient for all computing tasks.

The Intel Core i7-860 is the fastest Intel CPU in this field but also the most expensive one, we are talking about a difference of €100 here.

• My Selection: Intel Core i7-860
• Alternative: AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE

Build Your Own PC: Motherboard

The selected CPU leads directly to the motherboard that we need. The Intel Core i7-860 needs an LGA-1156 CPU socket type  motherboard. We use our needs and wishes that we came up with earlier in this step. The motherboard needs to offer all the connectors that we need, e.g. Firewire, which makes the selection process easier for us as we need to find and evaluate only those motherboards that support all the features that we need.

What should the motherboard offer?

• Minimum number of memory slots: 4
• CPU: At least Intel Core i7-860
• Memory: At least DDR3 1600
• USB 3.0
• Onboard Lan: 1000/100/10
• Onboard Sounds: Indifferent
• Onboard Video: No
• SLI: No
• SATA 3 GB/s: At least six
• Raid: No
• Other Connectors: Not needed

This may obviously look different when you build your own PC. It is again important to make an initial selection of 2-3 motherboards that offer what you are looking for. The next step is very important. Perform a search for that motherboard on the Internet and add keywords like problem, error, or help to it. Take a look at those posts and the number of them to see how likely it is that you might run into troubles.

The Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 is one of the few motherboards that support USB 3.0 right now. It is not as expensive as many other  motherboards that offer USB 3.0 (costs $120).  The other motherboards that I have taken a look at are the  MSI P55-GD85 which retails for about $220 which has a surprisingly similar configuration to the Gigabyte motherboard and the ASUS P7H57D-V EVO for $200 which is the only one of the three with an HDMI port.

The Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 offers everything that I need plus it is roughly $100 cheaper than the rest of the motherboards. That’s enough to make it my pick in the motherboard category.

My Selection:

• GIGABYTE GA-P55-USB3

Build Your Own PC: RAM

The selection of the motherboard determines the RAM – or computer memory – that we can use. We also need to determine at this point if we want more than 4 Gigabytes of RAM. We would need a 64-bit operating system if we do.

We do need DDR3 RAM (to be precise 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM)  as this is the computer memory supported by our motherboard. We also need dual-channel or quad-channel and not triple-channel RAM as we have selected the Core i7-860 cpu. This means that we either need to shop for 4 Gigabytes of RAM or a factor of that (8, 12 or 16 which is the maximum supported by the motherboard).

It does not really make sense to buy less than 4 Gigabytes as it would limit the PC”s performance. Avid gamers or those that run applications that need as fast RAM as they can get might want to take a look at overclocked RAM or RAM that can be overclocked nicely. I usually stay away from that RAM though as the performance gains usually do not justify the price increase. The motherboard supports up to DDR3-2200.

My Selection

• CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 ($270)
• G.SKILL Trident 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (if you want faster) ($290)

This was the first part of the Build your own PC February edition. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I do. Leave a comment if you have questions or suggestions.

Windows Memory Diagnostic (link, via Vishal) is a dos tool which has to be installed on a floppy drive or CD. It can only be run during system start and not from within Windows. Many users will feel uncomfortable with this procedure but those affected by crashes might probably be inclined to try everything in their might to get to the reason of the crashes.

The tool will start the computer memory check instantly after its interface has been loaded during system startup. It will run test passes and it is important to perform at least one full test pass before quitting the software program.

The first test pass is the most important one. If no errors are found it is unlikely that additional runs will find errors. If errors are found you discovered a possible source for the system crashes, bluescreens and stop errors.

The installation should not pose difficulties for anyone. Buttons to create a startup floppy disk and to save a CD image to disk are provided upon execution. The first will create a bootable floppy disk containing the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool while the latter will create in ISO image windiag.iso that has to be burned to CD or DVD.

An alternative to Windows Memory Diagnostic is Memtest86+ which is highly recommended by computer professionals to check ram of computers. It has also be burned to CD and run during system start.

The tool that does this is called Crucial System Scanner (via Shellcity) which is a tool that can give you the information for a safe computer memory upgrade. It is however deeply connected with the Crucial store which sells computer memory.

When you start the tool it opens a website in your default web browser that is showing you your computer’s specifications.

It displays the number of RAM banks, the banks that already contain computer memory but more importantly than that the supported DRAM Types, the computer memory frequencies and the maximum that can be installed on the computer. In my case it would be DDR2 SDRAM with PC”-5300, PC2-6400 and PC2-8500 frequencies and a maximum of 8192 Megabytes of computer memory.

If the software is not able to detect the information properly you could enter the motherboard information manually to receive the same kind of information for the computer memory upgrade. Oh, and you do not have to buy from their store obviously.

RAM, Random Access Memory, puzzles a lot of buyers. There is DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 RAM, different clock speeds and those cryptic CL-5-5-12 (random numbers) information. The question if a buyer should go with DDR2-800 or DDR2-1066, DDR3-800 or DDR3-1066 with different CL settings is hard to answer. And that’s why Tom’s Hardware decided to test the available RAM and see how faster RAM affected the performance of a computer.

The results are somewhat disappointing for the faster is better crowd. The fastest RAM tested, the DDR2-1066 4-4-4-12 increased the performance of the system by roughly 10% over the slowest DDR2-667 5-5-5-12 RAM. And that was only in one game, all other tested games saw an increase of only 4%. I think it’s interesting to note that faster RAM is obviously not worth the extra cash.

For a 2 Gigabyte system it would mean between 2 and 6 Gigabyte of virtual memory preferably taken from a secondary hard drive and not the system partition. The Virtual Memory to low warning pops up if the RAM and virtual memory are not able to store all the data needed and there are basically two solutions for this.

The first one would be to install more RAM. If you run Windows Vista with 512 Megabyte you will have an overall experience of slowness and might experience the virtual memory to low warning quite often even if you set that value to 1.5 or 2 Gigabytes. I would suggest to increase the RAM to 2 Gigabyte (or 4 Gigabyte) if you have the budget.

Ram is not that expensive currently and you can get 4 Gigabytes for as low as $75 plus shipping at Newegg currently. (make sure your computer is compatible and read the reviews).

If adding more RAM is not an option you can try to raise the virtual memory itself and move it to another hard drive if one is available. Depending on the settings already in place I would choose a value of at least twice the RAM amount and at least 2 Gigabytes.

You can check the virtual memory setting by pressing the [Windows Pause] keys which should open System Properties. Click on the Advanced tab and there on settings under Performance.

Click again on the Advanced tab and you will see the Virtual Memory setting at the bottom. Reducing background applications could also help getting rid of the Virtual Memory too low warning message.

While I did not conduct any tests I have the feeling that everything is running just a bit more fluent, a tad faster with less activity on my hard drives. I had a lot of hard drive activity for instance when Newsbin was loading the headers of a popular newsgroup which seemed to have been reduced quite a bit by the increase in RAM.

It should also have a impact on games for instance. I don’t play games at the moment except for CIV IV which is an excellent game but not a resource hungry one. It seems to run a bit faster but I could not see a big change here. It will become more obvious when I start playing games like Hellgate London for instance.

I’m running XP which does not need that much RAM. If I would be running Vista instead I would probably see a big increase in performance though. I sometimes have to work with large videos and a short test has shown that the video editing application uses the additional Gigabyte well.

So, yes it is faster. Yes it reduces load on the hard drives. Yes it is totally worth it. At least for me.

Download the free software Memtest86+ as an iso image (currently Memtest 3.3 iso) and burn it to a compact disk. Reboot your computer afterwards and boot the CD that you just created. You might need to change the boot order in your bios to be able to boot from CD. Memtest86+ is starting automatically from CD and performing in depth memory tests that could take hours to complete.

If errors are encountered during the test you know that you have faulty RAM and need to replace it. If you have more than one RAM bar installed you should test them separately to make sure you know which one is the faulty one. I ran the test just a few hours ago and realized that one of my ram bars is indeed faulty which made me order new RAM immediately.

This tips might also be useful to those users who use an old computer with Windows Vista. My Vista installation is using about 430 megabytes of Ram in default state with only one instance of Internet Explorer 7 running as well. The following paragraphs contain a list of changes that I made and their effect on the system.

• Disabling the Sidebar
• Changing the Design to Windows Classic
• Changing the Background image to one color
• Disabling the Windows Firewall and Bitdefender

Those changes alone dropped the ram usage by 60 megabytes to 370 with one Internet Explorer window open. There are many settings that can still be tweaked to gain even more performance, for instance removing unnecessary services and indexing. I will take a look at those in the coming days.

The question of course remains why you would like to change to Vista if you disable everything “new” that Vista offers. I personally think that it introduces lots of gimmicks that freeware on XP offered for years. And if it is security that you want you should take a look at Linux instead.