i845 SDram new build and/or upgrade?

[GregMal]

How many people out there are really interested in building a new system and/or upgrading
an older system with the new i845 SDram 478 chipset? Why/why not? Are you waiting for
the i845 DDR chipset in a few months???
Greg

 

[Athlon4all]

Well, here's why I wouldn't upgrade or build using 845 SDR. It put's the performance of a P4 at least 500MHz slower than it's really clocked compared to a T-Bird. Plus, 850 isn't that much more and neither is PC800 RDRAM. It's not 845 itself, it's a great chipset, but it is crippled by PC133, and needs PC2100 DDR. I might buy 845-D if it's perfromance is on par with P4X266/850

 

[dullard]

The only reason to get SDRAM is to save money. If you get 256 MB (double the current standard amount of memory) you will spend $74-$15=$59 more. Many benchmarks show 10%-30% speed decrease when using SDRAM. For me I'd certainly pay $59 for a 10%-30% speed boost. If you get only 128 MB the price difference becomes $21 for a huge difference in speed.

The only reason that I'd consider SDRAM is if I needed well over 1 GB and speed was not too important.

Note: Prices were current from pricewatch.com.

 

[rockhard]

yeah, if you need loads of ram with half decent performance, there aint a lot else out there
I need a lot of ram rather than speed to keep from hitting the HD's which bottleneck my rig, so with 1gig sticks of PC133 being dirt cheap its mighty tempting.
Im seriously considering ditching my 1.4 gig TBird/K7S5A/512mb Crucial DDR rig for a Supermicro i845 with maybe 1.8gig P4 and 2 gig ECC PC133.
Im already hitting the swap with 140mb with 2x VM's running, and i need 3 or 4 running at once I wont use Via again, so feel a bit trapped at the moment.
Oh yeah, im on a budget too

 

[Windogg]

If you do have to get a P4, by all means get the i850 if stability and performance is key. Either that or wait for the i845 DDR or VIA P4X266.

The i845 SDR is IMHO a marketing gimmick to push the P4 into the mainstream. The SDRAM is such a bottleneck it destroys all the benefits of the P4.

Windogg

 

[rockhard]

Depends what your using your rig for.
I reckon that if i had a P4 with SDR, i would see no difference in performance.
As i type this ive got two Virtual Machines running (Win2K Server/Win2K Prof) on a XP host, with Outlook running and a text doc open too.
I have 512mb ram and im currently using 546mb of swap!
Now i see why people use SCSI, IDE is a joke under this
Question im curious about is:-

With the above mentioned, would i actually get better performance if i went i845 + 3 gig SDR?