Firehawk68, I just saw your other post and you lumped two different concepts into one question. I will try to sort them out:
Each program has a different bottleneck - the program runs at the speed of the slowest computer part. Some programs such as video editing requires LOTS of HD use. These editing programs will run as fast as the drives can operate (CPU speed, memory speed, and video card speed will not play a big role in the speed of the video editing program). Many 3D games are video card intensive: they will run at the speed of the video card regardless of the speed of your memory, HD, or CPU. Other programs have memory speed bottlenecks, and yet others will have a CPU bottleneck.
Concept 1) DDR SDRAM is faster than SDRAM by roughly 10% (although it will vary with different motherboards). IF you run programs that are memory intensive, a DDR machine will be roughly 10% faster. IF you run programs that require intensive HD use or intensive video card use, you will not see a difference in speed.
Concept 2) If a program requires more memory than you have, it will use the HD as memory. A HD is about 1000 times slower than memory. Thus you will drastically slow the program if it runs out of memory.
Your question of 512 MB SDRAM vs 256 MB DDR depends on the programs you use. Very few programs need more than 256 MB, thus the extra memory with 512 MB SDRAM will go unused. If this is your situation, get the 256 MB of DDR since it will run 10% faster on many programs. IF you use programs that need more than 256 MB, DEFINATELY get the 512 MB SDRAM. This is since it will constantly access the HD with only 256 MB.
For the vast majority of people 256 MB of DDR will be better. Only if you really need more than 256 MB then I would settle for 512 MB of SDRAM (of course 512 MB of DDR is the best solution in this case).
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