SDR 384 or DDR 256?

[winterlude]

HI all,
A friend of mine has an Althlon XP 1700+ with an ECS K75SA board and 192 SDRAM pc133 (128+64mb sticks). He's wondering if he'll get a big boost if he switches to 256 DDR 266 (2100) RAM or should he buy another 256 SDRAM.

He mostly does video editting and watches DVD's on his system. He plays games too.

So what's the scoop?

 

[Yobbo]

I would go with 2x256 DDR

If not, I would go with the DDR....although it depends on the OS, if hes using XP he should get more, if hes using anything before 256 should be more than enough and hellavu faster.

 

[Brian48]

Go with the DDR.

 

[glenn1]

Go with the DDR.

PNY 256mb sticks with Samsung chips on the PCB can be had for about $30 after rebate in plenty of stores nowadays, Best Buy is one i can think of from the top of my head, and i'm pretty sure a couple of other stores as well. Not worth spending almost as much for another stick of pc-133.

 

[neutralizer]

Why was he even using SDR in the first place?

 

[McCarthy]

Though it's not good to be giving up the extra megs, neither is an extreme amount so with 384/256 I'd think the smaller amount of DDR would be a little better. Really not much difference until he gets more than 256 though, with the video editing the speed difference will certainly help, but if he ends up going to the swapfile for lack of physical ram he would have been much better off staying SDR.

For his situation the best choice might be to do nothing until he can afford to get the (2) 256's like Yobbo said.

neutralizer, I'm guessing his friend like so many of us already had a bunch of SDRam.

 

[AMEXplat]

Originally posted by: glenn1

Go with the DDR.

PNY 256mb sticks with Samsung chips on the PCB can be had for about $30 after rebate in plenty of stores nowadays, Best Buy is one i can think of from the top of my head, and i'm pretty sure a couple of other stores as well. Not worth spending almost as much for another stick of pc-133.

On the PNY, I too heard that Samsung (then Infineon, Elixir, etc) being the disired chip and PCB. But how does PNY, compare to other badges (i.e. Crucial, Micron, Kingston, Muskin, KByte)?

I noticed on my original DDR PC2100 128MB RAM stick is Micron Tech with CL=2.5. But my added stick is Samsung 256MB DDR PC2100 and CL=???. Is this a problem to mix and match or should have both latencys the same?

TIA 🙂

PS: I'm not a gamer, but run multiple heavy (mem resource intensive) applications at the same time.