Memory

[caleb2438]

Hello Again. Is there any other differences between ddr and sdram other than ddr being twice the speed? What I am getting at is: Would 1024mb of sdram be equivalant to 512mb of DDR? I have a 2.4ghz P4 with 400mhz bus with 1024 of sdram. Would I experience a noticable boost of power if I upgraded my system to 533mhz bus speed and 512mb of DDr? I am running Sonar and use an Omni studio for an interface. Thanks again!
- Caleb

 

[christiaan]

1) Would 1024mb of sdram be equivalant to 512mb of DDR? I have a 2.4ghz P4 with 400mhz bus with 1024 of sdram. 2)Would I experience a noticable boost of power if I upgraded my system to 533mhz bus speed and 512mb of DDr?

1) No. It doesn't work that way.
If you really need a lot of memory, you'd be better off with 1024MB of sdram. When your hd starts swapping, the performance drops really fast. 512 MB of RAM is more than enough for most people though.
2) Depends on the application but in general yes. The P4 excels at high memory bandwidth tasks like DVD -> Divx conversion. Using sdram on a P4 clearly cripples the CPU.

 

[caleb2438]

Thanks! SDRam and P4 isn't a good idea you are saying? This would create a bottleneck?

 

[brzilian]

Thanks! SDRam and P4 isn't a good idea you are saying? This would create a bottleneck?

First off, if your P4 is not the newer Northwood chip that supports 533Mhz FSB, then you're SOL.

Yes, by using SDRAM with a P4 system, you are creating a bottleneck. As far as Intel motherboards go for P4's ,you either choose the i850 or i845 chipset. the 850 was desgined to use RDRAM and the 845 DDR.

 

[sweetnubs]

ddr (266) ram in theory runs twice as fast as standard joe lunchbox and sally housecoat sdram. in actuality the performance gain lies usually between 5-20 percent over joe sixpack sdram. 512 megs of ddr would be preferable to 1024 of sdram. your p4 will be choked by holly homemaker sdram. it is advisable to get enough ram so as to be able to turn the swapfile off. you might want a little more than 512 if you are running xp. plus nt os's actually address large amounts of ram much better than the 9x operating systems. don' t be a johnny punch-clock, get more ram. as far as i know chipsets that support intel chips can only recognize up to ddr400. i think the newest amd boards support dual in-line ddr ram. i haven't researched this stuff in about a month so things might have recently changed. dual in-line ddr-ram is lame cause you get a very small speed increase and have to buy twice as much ram. we are probably not going to see anything faster than ddr400 though so looks like we'll be forced to go this route. although it should get faster as soon as they realize no one is going for it. a 533 mhz front side bus is mute at this point as far as memory is concerned because there is no memory in this whole wide big blue marble that takes advantage of this.