Do I have a grasp or am I all wet.

[Sharpedge]

I want to make sure what I have read is correct, as I want to upgrade to a P4 considering 2.4 or faster with the new releases.

To give the P4 the most memory bandwidth I would need to use rdram, but the perfomance increase over using DDR is only 5%. Is this right?

My last upgrade of board,cpu and memory was two years ago with a cpu change last year. Presently I have a P3V4X with a 1ghzP3, using 512mb of sdram memory. Using a dual boot of windows ME for some legacy programs and windows XP.

Because of what seems to be my timeline for upgrading is every two years,I end up relplacing the board,cpu and memory. I would like to put together a good solution but if the variance in performance is as i have stated, then it would seem to me a ddr combination would be the best. Reading anands reviews since i have a good graphics card an 845E as he used in the gaming machine might be my best bet.

Primarily the pc is being used for games,some photo editing which seems to be increasing as i learn more.

Thank you for your input into my question and for your support in all of my computer endeavors.

 

[nork]

sorry, i am new here and made a mistake

 

[Sharpedge]

After more reading I think i am leaning now more towards the DDR solution.

If my information is correct though your input would still be most appreciated.

Thanks AGAIN

 

[Lonyo]

DDR is cheaper and not that much slower, so you could probably get more of it. In 2 years time you'll have to buy new ram as well, like DDR II or whatever we have then, so get 1GB DDR and have some fun with it.

 

[nork]

I wondered the same thing before I made a p 4 system for myself. I read many articles that said there is very little difference in system performance between the 2. So I went with 512 mb standard ram. I have never done any benchmarking or anything but I am happy with my system running win98se, win 2k pro and win xp pro.
Just the other day I read an article that stated the "bottleneck" problem either isn't a problem or not very much of a problem, I forget exactly.
And the cost of mobo and sdram is much lower than the alternative.

 

[Sharpedge]

Thank you for your input. Hope your weekend is going well.