Science talk weekly
RAM is an acronym that stands for Random Access Memory, which probably doesn’t mean much at the moment, but as you have guessed, I’m about to explain. I’ve always thought of RAM like this: RAM is like the size of the desk you are working on. It doesn’t matter how fast you can work (or for a PC, how fast your CPU is), if you are trying to do a big job, and have hardly any space to work, it’s going to take you a long time. During high school, I had a small desk, and heaps of text books that I would use, as well as my exercise books. They would all pile up and when I was needing to access information, I was constantly shuffling through books, finding the information I needed, and then pulling out my exercise book, putting it on top of my other books so I could write in it, and homework would just take a long time. When I got to VCE, I got rid of my desk and started using a large table that was big enough to seat six people. Here I was able to lay out all of my texts books, and when I was studying, I could very quickly access all of the information I needed. RAM is the working memory of your computer. Whenever you are running a program or an application, the information is retrieved from another source, like a CD, DVD or hard disk drive(which I’ll explain in another post), and it is brought to the RAM. The more RAM you have, the more information you can have at the ready for your CPU to access. Some programs will require a lot of RAM to run efficiently, and other programs won’t need that much. Generally speaking, if I wanted better performance out of my PC I would first look at upgrading the RAM. Having more RAM (or more desk space) will allow the PC to have more information ready for use (more text books open), and hence should run quicker. There does come a point where you could have too much RAM, which won’t hinder your PC’s performance, but more so it’s just that you could have spent money elsewhere. If I go back to the desk analogy, if I had a stud of unlimited size, and say a 20m banquet table in it, and never wanted or needed to have more than 5 books open at one time, there’s no point to having such a massive table. I hope that sheds a bit more light on what RAM is, and how it fits into the overall picture of what’s happening inside your PC. This is what your typical stick of RAM looks like(above). The come in varying capacities, and simply plug into the motherboard. There are different variations outside of their capacity, so if you are upgrading, make sure your choice is compatible with your system. This is what a typical slot RAM on your motherboard looks like(above). You need at least one stick of RAM, but can use up to four. I have always had it recommended to me to go for a two stick kit that runs in the matching pair slots (ie both in yellow or both in orange). You can also see that in the bottom left of the picture is the white square socket where the CPU sits. It’s good to have the RAM as close to the CPU as possible. The smaller the distance the information needs to travel, the quicker it can work through calculations.
As always, many calculations means lots of energy is required and therefore lots of heat is produced – the bane of PCs. Just like the CPU, RAM can also come fitted with a heatsink, to assist cooling, and performance (below)
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Last week we spoke about the motherboard which is the large component that everything plugs into. This week we are going to look at the Central Processing Unit, more commonly known as the CPU. The CPU is the “brain” of your computer, and is responsible for doing many of the calculations. Whenever you turn on a computer, and run a program, the CPU is the main component that is doing all of the calculations and computations. I will continue to talk about Windows based PCs and not Apple, mainly because I don’t have any experience with pulling apart Apple computers to learn their interiors. The main brands that you would associate with CPUs are Intel and AMD. They have competitively been producing CPUs for as long as I’ve been using PCs, and there has often been a long running debate as to which is better. AMD or Intel? The CPU for its size is quite heavy, and this is due to the dense metal layer that sits on top of the circuitry. This metal is known as a heat sink. Its job is to absorb all of the heat that is produced inside of the processor. A large amount of electricity is passing through the CPU as it does its calculations, and as a result, lots of heat is made. Metal is an excellent conductor of heat, and with draw the heat away from the core. A large heatsink will be placed on top of the CPU, and then a fan will usually sit on top of that. It is important to keep the CPU cool in order for it to function efficiently. In some high end machines, water cooling technology is used to keep the system cool.
A lot of modern technology these days will contain a CPU. They are the “brain” of any computer. Next week, we will look at Random Access Memory, better known as RAM. |
How this beganWhat started out as a quick weekly Q&A in my school's paper newsletter has grown into an online multimedia science spot. Archives
October 2015
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