Memory is one of the key components of your system and is something that you are likely to take with you on a future upgrade, assuming you have been insightful or perhaps just lucky when choosing your motherboard platform. Choosing memory can be a confusing matter, with many varieties available in different speeds, pin counts and timings. Even the amount of memory you need isn't obvious.

Some companies will try and lure you in with extra eye candy, such as copper cooling plates and activity LED's. With our help you can see past the marketing. We have taken a look at the latest DDR and DDR2 memory from several manufacturers and put them all head to head, so you know what is best to buy.

If you haven't already, we recommend reading our memory guide which explains how memory works and shows the performance impact of different latencies, speeds and types of memory. This information can be very useful when it comes to your buying decision.

A DIMM with an asterisk by it's name, denotes memory worthy of an award.