Two Quick Questions

[jb444]

Hi All,

1. I just bought a fan and temp monitoring thingy for my 5.25" bay, it came with four cables to connect up temperature sensors, but none of my components have a temp sensor output. Do any components have one? I ain't seen any that do.

2. What do i need to look at when buying RAM? Aside from the frequency, I know very little. Are there any threads explaining latency and all that so I know what to look for? Cheers,

Chris

 

[vidkid1]

The temp sensors, do they look like a wire with some dark tape around it? If so, I usually slide it between the chasis and the drive to monitor the surface temp of some components.

 

[Grafficks]

1. My case came with a temperature sensor. It was this wire with a...um.."thing" on the tip which supposedly reads the temperature. I just pulled it up, tied it to a nearby IDE cable, and suspended it in mid-air to provide a reading for ambient case temperature.

For these types of temperature sensors, you can just put it anywhere you want, to monitor the temp. of any component you want.



2. For RAM, there's brand, size, type, bandwidth, speed, and latency to consider. I'll try to be brief here:


- For example, brands like Corsair or Crucial are good RAM brands.

- Size is pretty straight forward.

- Bandwidth is, for example, "PC-3200". This "3200" means the RAM module is capable of a theoretical 3.2 GB/s (3200 MB/s) of bandwidth. The higher the better.

-Speed is specified on RAM all the time. For example, when it says "DDR400" on a label it means that it is DDR running at 400MHz. The higher the better.

-Memory latency is defined as the length of time between sending a request and receiving the response. Memory latency is determined by a string of numbers in its spec. A module spec'd at 3-4-3-9 would take less time to respond (respond faster) than a module spec'd at 5-5-5-10. The lower the numbers, the better.