Why PC3 12800 is able to fit the specification of a 16gb ram stick

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alphamonkey11

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Feb 13, 2016
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I am currently building a pc and I was wondering how a 16gb stick of ram would be pc3 12800
If the bandwidth is 12.8 gb for the ram then why would I get a stick that is 16 gb isn't it useless

For example if I have a 16gb stick of ram with the specification 1600 and PC3 12800 then wouldn't the peak data transfer rate be 12.8 gb and therefore the remaining gb on the 16gb stick be useless.
 
Solution
Tradesman1
You don't use the entire stick for each individual action :) At any given time the DRAM will holding data, and can be processing multiple requests as might be allowed by the total amount of the DRAM, can look in Task manager and get an an idea of how much is cached (being held), in processes it will give you a rough number for how much is used by each process (which is a minimal amount), etc
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Tradesman1

Tradesman1

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Jun 5, 2013
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You don't use the entire stick for each individual action :) At any given time the DRAM will holding data, and can be processing multiple requests as might be allowed by the total amount of the DRAM, can look in Task manager and get an an idea of how much is cached (being held), in processes it will give you a rough number for how much is used by each process (which is a minimal amount), etc
 
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Solution
lordmogul

lordmogul

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Jun 14, 2014
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The PC12800 specification calls out the bandwith.
So its ~12.8 GB per second.
That just means that it would take more than 1 full second to entirely fill your memory.
But since hard drives are usually around 12 MB/s and SATA SSDs peak around 520 MB/s that wont be any problem.

What you are indicating is like saying USB sticks can't be bigger than 60 MB since that is the maximum transfer rate of USB 2 which is 480 Mbit or 60 MB/s (for USB 3 it's around 500 MB/s)

You have to distuingish betwenn the clock speed (1600 MHz DDR in your case) the Transfer rate (12,8 GB/s according to the PC3 12800 specs) and the size (which is 16 GB in this case)
 
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