Our tests have examined the effect of different memory on high-end machines, but if you’re putting together a budget PC, then different considerations should come to the fore at checkout time.
For starters, don’t splash out on an expensive, fast memory kit if you’re going to be constructing a PC built around one of Intel’s Haswell-based Celeron or Pentium chips, as most of these only support DDR3 that runs at 1,333MHz. That’s slow enough to cause a performance hit in many tests, but on a low-end PC, it’s unlikely you’ll be running the sort of applications that’ll suffer with lesser speeds.
AMD’s APUs are more accepting to faster memory, but you’ll still need to pay attention to speeds. A couple of its cheapest parts only handle 1,333MHz or 1,600MHz DDR3,…
