Does larger computer memory have greater speed?

Answer 1

It depends on what type of memory you are talking about. With RAM (Random-Access-Memory), the amount of information it can hold is fairly low, but the speed at which the computer can access the information is much faster than the speed of a hard drive.

Another factor in the speed of computers is the CPU and the motherboard itself. Depending on when the motherboard was manufactured and how good the CPU is, there is a limit past which the motherboard will not be able to use any more RAM you put in the computer. Filling the capacity of the motherboard for RAM does improve PC speed, but if the CPU is an old or slow one it won't matter.

Also, the hard drive memory (which is larger in size but information takes longer to access) can factor into speed. If the hard drive that the operating system is installed on is completely full, then it will slow down the computer. The reason is that when the RAM is maxed out, the computer will automatically configure part of the free space on a hard drive to use as RAM.

Answer 2

No, the speed of processing remains the same (if it is compared to similar memory); however, if the computer has more RAM memory it means that more processing can be done in the memory without having to keep reading and writing information to the hard disk - which is a slower process.

The net effect is that the computer can process more information faster than a computer with a small amount of memory.

Answer 3

Yes and no. You might not notice any overall performance, but you may find more stability and some performance gains in specific situations. The processing speed remains the same, assuming the same type and speed of memory is used. However, there are a couple of reasons increasing memory may make the computer seem faster:

1. Less information would need to be swapped out to the hard drive into a swap file. Less hard drive accesses would make things faster.

2. In some cases, having more memory sockets filled changes the memory access strategy. For instance, on some motherboards, the sockets are controlled independently, so the more sockets are filled, the more memory can be read or written to simultaneously.

3. Some applications are good at utilizing memory, and with more memory, they cache more of their data in memory and access the hard drive less.

4. If you have to change all the memory in order to add more, you can gain a small amount of speed by using faster memory.