Memory Speed and FSB issue.

[iwodo]

I know First When Dual Channel Came out everybody say it gives performance boast. Mainly due to more bandwidth avalible.

But in a case of Celeron. When its FSB is 400Mhz, So would a Pair of 256Mb DDR 400 Memory give any advantage over a single 512MB DDR 400?

i.e as long as the Memory speed is adadequate for the CPu then it is ok?

And how do i calculate the Transfer Speed of a Intel and AMD FSB ?
And how do i calculate the speed of DDR and DDR2 Memory?

 

[iwodo]

bump

 

[iwodo]

bump........

 

[Fern]

Free bump for you. C'mon intel peeps!

 

[meltdown75]

i'm not an intel peep. but, i know with my setup, i cannot reap the benefits of DDR without 2 sticks. 1 512 is good for me cuz i will eventually get the matching 512. but if i needed immediate DDR then i would have to go with 2x256.

come on intel PEEPS

 

[Peanya]

And how do i calculate the Transfer Speed of a Intel and AMD FSB ?

The transfer speed has to do with the bits and frequency. Intels use 64 bits on the FSB. I'm not sure on AMD (the XP CPU) but the AMD 64 doesn't share it's system bus with the memory like Intels do. This is one of the reasons the AMD 64 is so fast. That and the greatly reduced latency of memory due to the integrated memory controller. Low latency memory helps this even more.

And how do i calculate the speed of DDR and DDR2 Memory?

With DDR, it's the same. PC3200 gets its name by the theoretical bandwidth of the memory. Keep in mind that latency also improves preformance. With most dual channel setups (aside from the AMD 64) latency doesn't effect performance as much as single channel memory does.


Now for your first question: The difference in performance between single channel and dual channel is less than 5%, not much at all. Dual channel memory is faster, even for economy CPU's such as the Celeron. If you can, upgrade to 1 gig of memory, that will give you a nice performance boost, especially with SP2 on WinXP. If you can't afford it now, get 1 stick of 512MB Crucial, and add another when you can.