how much ram will work with a typical mobo.

ok, firstly let me tell you guys that the last pc i have ever built was a p4 running at 2.8Mhz, which means most of everything I know is ancient.

I will be building a new pc soon and need to catch up on my knowledge of things, this is where you guys can really help me out. I'd like to thank you guys in advance for all the advice you are about to give, I really appreciate it.

ok, for the question. With ram slots, I see all sorts of colours and they are usually paired, for instance I would see 2 blue slots spaced equally apart with black slots in between. I have also seen orange and yellow ones. What do the colours mean?

how much ram can we use on a mobo with 4 slots but with different colours?

can all slots be used at any one time and what can influence the speeds at which it operates at. I see dual channel boards, can four chips run all at once with dual channel support?

thats it for now, might have more coming. thanks again.

The colours indicate where the dual channel ram should be placed so ie a 2gb matched kit would go in one colour and a second matched pair would go in the other colour, just in case you are unaware 99% ram sold in kits of more than 1 stick are matched at the fabrication plant to perform almost identically to each other so as to aid with overclocking etc.

As for maximum ram supported, i would suggest 8gb is the standard maximum supported, possibly more so on some boards but to be honest no more than 4gb is required unless you are doing some really heavy photo editing or the ilk and you would need a x64 OS to see over 3.25gb as X32 XP etc can only see 3.25gb maximum.

So yes all 4 slots can be utilized in dual channel mode at once.

Seeing as you have been out of the loop for a while can i suggest you stick with intel and go for a core 2 duo or a intel quad core as AMD offer nothing in comparison atm, for a PSU a corsair hx520 or if your bedget is higher one of the 650w or 750w variants would be great, for your motherboard i suggest going with an asus board with the intel P35 chipset or an MSI p35 platinum like mine is also a great choice at a good price, as for ram ddr3 is expensive, so unless you are going for high front side bus overclocks, i would suggest sticking with ddr2 for the time being which can be picked up dirt cheap which only leaves the graphics graphics card which imo should go in this order dependant on budget from low to high, ATI 3850, ATI 3870 and lastly Nvidia 8800GT all of these cards will provide excellent performance at 1680x1024 resolutions in 995 of modern games

Oc1Kenube, thanks for the lightning reply, it's crystal clear now.

just a little addition, with the 2 matched pairs, do they have to be of the same make, size and timing. I'm not really sure but people that sell this stuff tend to emphasize on the ram timings and the lower the better I guess.

as for your suggestions, I actually did look into a cosair psu, and the nvidia 8800 gpu before this question about ram came to my mind. I'm not going to think about the processor a whole lot since its like the best deal you can ever imagine, by far its the q6700 quad from intel's retail program.

thanks again.

<Edit> Welcome to the foums btw

I would reccomend all 4 sticks have matching latencies and speeds more so with speeds as all sticks will run at the speed of the lowest rated ram.

As for cpu the Q6600 go stepping is a great cpu and a lot cheaper than q6700 to boot i still think if you are just a gamer stick with dual core and overclock the sucker the new penryn 45nm chips are about to land and use LOTS less power than the quads and 4ghz on stock cooling at a good price point is very tempting imo