Differences between RAM

[Pato_1]

I'm building a computer, nothing special. I have MSI B85M-G43 ( which says it allows maximum of 64gb ddr3 1600mhz ram ) and I'm going to buy 8gb kit of micron sdrams 1.65v. My question there is : what's the difference between sdram and ram ? what's the difference between dimm and udimm ? will it run on my motherboard ? Do voltage have big meaning ? I searched on internet a little but it bring more chaos to me. Thanks for every resposne.

 

[DigitalHamster]

After researching the matter myself, I have come to the following conclusions:

1) RAM is the fast memory in your computer. Pretty much any consumer computer is going to use RAM. SDRAM appears to also be ram, but this time its synchronised with the CPU and memory. So if it is called RAM or SDRAM, it is the same thing.
2) Dimm and Udimm are different terms for the same thing. Dimm is a generic name, where Udimm tells us the memory is unregistered. Again, this is of no importance because consumer computers use unbuffered, unregistered, non-ECC memory. So they are the same thing.
3) Voltage is not of much importance. However, most CPUs are not rated to handle RAM running at more than about 1.8 to 1.9v. If you were overclocking, using RAM at 1.65v might have less overclocking headroom, but then again the memory may be using the higher voltage to operate at a higher stock speed (such as high performance memory - for example 2133MHz).

A simple conclusion - The memory you are looking at is just DDR3 RAM which runs at 1.65v, and it should work just fine in the computer.

A note to add: It is possible the RAM will not run at its full speed or at 1.65v until you enable the XMP profile in the BIOS.