DDR v SDR - much difference?

General Questions
#1

(we really need that computer-questions forum)

Now that someone pays me to sit and use the internet or watch TV (and read a number from a piece of paper every now and then) I intend to keep my computer reasonably up-to-date.

Just recently I bought a gigabyte of ram. The ability of my motherboard to use ddr was in doubt so I thought sod it, and bought SDR Ram.

The next thing I intend to buy is a new Processor (the max that my motherboard can take - an AMD athlon 2100MHz)

With 1GB of RAM, a geforce 4, soundblaster Live, amd athlon 2100 will the fact that the memory is SDR be the major bottleneck? Is there much difference between DDR and SDR?

(should I have not been an impatient twat and waited a day so that I could check my motherboard’s capability to use ddr?)

#2

The shop guy was very reluctant to let me just buy the DDR and bring it back if it didn’t work. I had just left work so was in town. And I had just been paid so NEEEEEEDED to spend money!

#3

ok. Yes, your memory is a bottle neck. SDR memory simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to keep your processor fed. You probably won’t notice unless you do something intensive like extensive gaming though.

What kind of mother board are you using? There are several incarcations of the AMD athlon XP. You might need to upgrade to a very specific processor type Theres Athlon Thunderbird, Athlon XP Palamino, Athlon XP throughbred and athlon throughbrd XP b. Palamino topped out at 2100+, however Throughbred B began at 1600+. It’s really quite confusing, and can be problematic. I.E my motherboard will take Palamino Cpus, but doesn’t support Throughbred CPU’s.

What do you have now? What motherboard do you have? and for the love of god don’t buy stuff from a storefront. Buy computer parts ONLINE unless you want to be horrendously ripped off.

#4

Check see if your board supports DDR, and at what speed. Get the maximum it can support, probably, hm PC2700.

#5

I don’t really see a point in getting the “maximum” his board can suport. pc 2100 ram is perfectly fine for any AMD cpu until the barton core. a 2100+ is definitely not a barton core. 2700 affords you some upgrade room, but I suspect your next upgrade will not be for several years at which point the next step in AMD is the hammer. THe hammer has a 400 fsb and you don’t want to spend 300 dollars on ram today right?

#6

Yeah, PC2100 will be fine. The Athlon XP processors do demand DDR to attain optimal performance.

#7
      • And You Didn’t Ask, But… on another board I visit, somebody posted a link to a broadband review site, with a online test for your download/upload/storage speed. Storage speeds seemed to fall into two groups: those from 50-70 megs/second, and those with 350-400 megs/second. The 50-70 megs/second people were all using the regular mobo hard-drive controllers, while everybody with the high storage speeds were running RAIDs.

It’s not cheap, but I have long seen that when my computer runs slow it’s generally trying to use the HD to read or write. I can’t help but wonder how much faster any computer would “run” with a mobo IDE HD vs. RAID disks. Previous to this info I had never even considered a RAID array…
~

#8

DougC…

My uber tech literate brother has been stressing to me for a long time that, in modern computers, the bottleneck in any system will ALWAYS be found in the hard drive. There’s only so fast they can make those suckers go, and 7200 RPM is the highest speed I’ve seen for any IDE drive (although SCSI drives are getting up to 15000 RPM). RAID seems to be the way to go… get two 80-gig HD’s, for instance, and RAID 'em to work like a single 80-gig HD, and it’ll run twice as fast. RAID three of 'em, and it’ll run three times as fast.

The cost of three 80-gig IDE drives is cheaper than one 80-gig SCSI drive… anybody know which one would perform better?

#9

SPOOFE…

Btw, when you raid for performance you actually get 80 + 80 + 80. = 240 gb. Basically you write 1/3 of every file on the harddrives and you can therefore read the entire file in 1/3 the time. The problem is if you lose one harddrive you’re fubared. But with modern harddrives it’s hardly a problem. You can also run raid redundancy 80 + 80 + 80 = 80. I think it’s self-explanatory how that works.