Ram Form Factors and their differences

Ram comes in different shapes and sizes, with different generations and numbers of pins. The physical size of a ram stick is called Form Factor and the most common form factors are DIMM and SODIMM.

DIMM – is a ram form factor that is in most cases used in desktops. DIMM sticks are mainly 5.5 inches (13.9 cm) long and 1.1 inches (2.7 cm) high. They are widely used in desktop machines due to their fast data transfer speed. Now if we talk about how many pins a DIMM stick has it depends on its generation. The DDR gen DIMMs have 184-pins, DDR2 and DDR3 have 240-pins, DDR4 and DDR5 have 288-pins.

SODIMM – a ram form factor used in smaller devices like laptops. We can call SODIMM sticks as half of DIMM sticks because of their length which is 2.7 inches (6.8 cm). This ram form factor was primarily created for smaller devices because of the insufficiency of space so it is widely used in laptops. The pin size of SODIMM ram depends on its generation and with newer generations we are seeing the ram sticks decrease in length which is great as we can make laptops thinner and lighter. The pin sizes are following: DDR and DDR2 have 200-pins, DDR3 has 204-pins, DDR4 has 260-pins, DDR5 has 262-pins

If you want to find out your ram's form factor look at this article.