How does RAM affect the computer's performance?

Answer 1

RAM stands for Random Access Memory. It stores the data needed for all of the programs that are currently running. The more RAM you have, the more data you can access at once and the more programs you are able to have open simultaneously. Modern computers will default to the hard drive once your RAM is full, but this is a painstakingly slow process. If your computer freezes up because you have too many things open, you may need to upgrade the RAM.

Answer 2

RAM is required for a machine to work at all. While more is generally better, having more than what is required only helps indirectly. The more RAM you have, the more programs you can run at once, and the less that the operating system has to swap out memory to the hard drive to make more room. So with less need for disk activity, there will be some performance improvement.

In some cases, using multiple sticks of memory will gain some performance gains over just using just one or two, since some systems use multi-banking to access multiple sticks of memory at the same time. While each stick can only operate so fast, the effective throughput can be increased by accessing multiple sticks simultaneously, reading from them or writing to them as a combined unit.