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Heat Sink & Fan
Another component whose importance is often underestimated. Like a poor quality power supply, a poor quality heat sink and fan applied to a processor can cause the processor chip not to receive correct heat dissipation and cooling and is a common cause of computer crashes. Correct application of a heat sink and fan to a processor chip, using a good thermal paste, when building a system is also very important.
 


Memory
There are two main types of memory found in computer systems today;

SDR SDRAM (commonly called SD RAM)
DDR SDRAM

SD RAM is actually SDR SDRAM, and DDR RAM is actually DDR SDRAM.

SDRAM stand for Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory and applies to both types of memory.

SDR stands for Single Data Rate and DDR stands for Double Data Rate, and generally speaking, as the name implies, DDR memory will run twice as fast SDR Memory.

SDR SDRAM comes in three main flavors and is found in older systems generally built in the 1990's. Chips are categorised as PC66, PC100 and PC133.

Each successive number refers to the bus speed of the RAM in MHz, thus PC66 runs at 66 MHz, PC100 runs at 100 MHz, etc.

SDR SDRAM has 168 connector pins on the chip and the motherboard that you are using will usually support either SDR SDRAM or DDR SDRAM although some motherboards do support both types of chips by having both types of slots available.

DDR SDRAM has 184 connector pins which is one reason you can't just use DDR instead of SDR on a motherboard that only supports SDR memory chips. DDR SDRAM comes in many different flavors also; PC2100 which runs at 266 MHz, PC2700 which runs at 333 MHz, PC3200 which runs at 400 MHz, etc.

The bus speed of your motherboard, processor and memory chips should match each other to get the best performance from a system. For example, if your motherboard supports bus speeds of 400MHz then you should have a processor with a 200MHz bus speed (doubled by the motherboard to 400MHz) and PC3200 DDR RAM which also runs at 400MHz.

Lower speed processors and memory will usually work in a 400MHz motherboard but you will then be paying for technology which you are not using.

However, if you can only afford a 266MHz processor and memory then it is still worth getting a 400MHz motherboard because this gives you good upgrade possibilities in the future when you can afford to upgrade your processor and memory chips.

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