Question about motherboards and RAM and stuff

I'm kinda confused about motherboards and RAM.

1) All it seems a motherboard does is connect things together and basically give the user ways to hook thing up tothe computer.

2) Do mother boards have speeds that would bottleneck the RAM or other components.

3) Can you have two different RAM sticks with different timings?

4) Can your GPU use GDDR3 when your RAM can only use DDR2 and DDR2 is only what your mobo can us?

That's all for now I might think of other questions later.

Yes, the motherboard is basically the initial framework of your computer, and it determines the kinds of components you can have in your PC.

Motherboards are based around a chipset, or co-processors that help your CPU interface with RAM, PCI/PCI-e, USB. SATA, etc... This chipset will limit what kind of CPU you can install, what kind of HDDs, number of PCIe slots and in some instances RAM.

Chipsets determine FSB speeds and what kind of CPU's you can install. On Intel motherboards, the chipset determines what kind of RAM can be installed in the motherboard (Core 2 and earlier), in AMD processors, the CPU contains the memory controller, so the CPU determines what kind of RAM can be installed. With the new Core i7 processors from Intel, the memory controller will be integrated into the CPU like AMD's appraoch.

Graphics cards only require that you have the appropriate slot available and can power them. The type of memory that the graphics card uses is not dependent on the motherboard, because the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) has it's own memory controller.

Sometimes the motherboard chipset can be a limitation if you want to install more than one graphics card in an SLI or Crossfire configuration, single cards, however, will not be limited by the chipset.

EDIT: Yes, the motherboard can use different timings of RAM, but it's not recommended, the highest speed RAM will be slowed to match the lowest speed module, and if different capacities and timings are used, you may lose performance. All installed modules must be of the same type, DDR, DDR2, and DDR3. DDR2 and DDR3 are the standard right now, with DDR3 becoming more and more commonplace.

DDR stands for Double Data Rate, so when you see the frequency, you have to multiply the intitial frequency by 2 to get the operational speed.

CL is cas latency. To use an analogy, you are packing a truck, RAM bandwidth is the size of the truck, CL is how fast you can pack the truck, and frequency determines how many deliveries you can make within 1 second. A lower CL at the same frequency will be faster, but you should try to find a module that matches your existing one, the will still work together regardless though.

I already answered that question, but I don't think you caught it :).

With DDR you multiply the operational frequency by 2 to get the operational speed, in this case 266*2≈533. Buy a module that says DDR2-533