DDR mobos

[Guest]

Correct me if I am being naive, but how is the new Via Pro266 chipset for the PIII supposed to offer any advantage over the i815 chipset. Let me put it more clearly, if the FSB is 133MHz and 64 bits wide for both, then the CPU is only able to speak to the memory at this bandwidth, it doesn't matter if the memory is SDRAM, DDRAM, or RAMBUS. This is probably the reason the P4 benefits from RAMBUS because both its memory and FSB bandwidth are theoretically 3.2GB/sec. Now the only chipset that has any benefit, although it is only small, is the AMD761 (or whatever the DDR chipset is) but doesn't this also have an improvement in the FSB from 100MHz to 133MHz DDR.

Sorry for the rant, but I thought I should put this forward seeing as a lot of hardware sites are going on about how no CPU (apart from the P4) is able to take any benefit from more bandwidth.

 

[Guest]

I Would Agree with you. DDR will provide Better Bandwidth to the P4 BUT both the P-III and the T-Bird show little performance over 133 Mhz SD-RAM.

However ......

I only run Dual Processor Boards at Home. My 2 x 1Ghz P-III are starved because they have to Share the Bandwidth that was designed for 1 Processor. IWILL have a Board due out (DVD266R i Think) Which is Dual P-III. I believe that Dual Processor T-Bird's and P-III's will benefit from DDR more than a Single Processor ever could.

 

[Guest]

Sorry, but a dual P6 setup will not be able to use DDR bandwidth any better because they share the same bus and therefore bandwidth. K7 is a different story as the EV6 bus (channel really) is separate and dedicated to each processor in a multi-processor setup.
The test of the Apollo Pro266 could have shown an advantage for DDR if the test exercised the rest of the system a bit more by having loads of DMA stuff going on simultaneously. Lots of disk activity and a cheap graphics card that relied on AGP texturing might have shown some benefit from PC2100 compared to PC133. Then again that would require the chipset to be able to buffer and interleave all those requests to and from memory in an efficient manner.

 

[Guest]

Does the 266 chipset support AMD???

 

[smn198]

Wouldn't the larger latency of DDR ram (about x2 SDR ram) have more of an effect?

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=1686" target="_new">System spec.</A> Ideas appreciated.

 

[SoulReaper]

3-5%, in my eye is not worth spending the extra money. DDR was suppose to be this great thing, but like everything else it turned out to suck in the end. YEY for DDR...not!

--SR