Summer break is just around the corner and students are looking to spend their savings on building a fresh new PC that can run all the demands and games. Primarily, high school seniors like Kevin Yi are looking to build or upgrade their PCs to bring to their college dorms this September.

“I know about graphics cards and CPUs but there’s so much more to PC building that’s hard to understand.” Those that have little or no experience building or upgrading one have a hard time getting the necessary information to get the best performance from the money they are paying. An important part of PC building that people struggle to understand is RAM. Random Access Memory (RAM for short) is a short-term memory in a computer that is used when the PC is running a program or application. RAM varies in memory size and speed which can affect the speed and efficiency of the computer when running a program.

The size of memory simply decides how many programs can be run on the PC, speed is much more complicated since it decides how fast the programs are processed. While it’s hard to visually tell if a program is being processed quickly or not, a benchmark test of ram can show a clear difference in processing speed. When a RAM with a speed of 2666MHz is compared with a RAM with a speed of 3600 MHz, the 3600 MHz RAM averaged 17% more in performance score and 22% more in peak score. (results) With the price difference of about $30, better performance is achievable. Another benefit of 3600MHz is that AMD processors are optimized to perform best in the 3600MHz range. Purchasing this RAM gets you better performance and future proofing.

Kevin Yi was in shock after seeing these results quote “I did know RAM speed can change performance but I didn’t know 3600MHz fit so well with the new (AMD) CPUs.” He added, “I plan on changing from Intel to AMD this summer so I will definitely remember this.”

Although new and exciting technology like AMD CPUs can bring revolutionary change to the PC building market, a world-wide memory shortage that has been continued for 2 years now will definitely affect buyers looking to upgrade hardware. Thus keeping track and staying up to date on parts like RAM can strongly benefit your next building experience.