Which is best/fastest memory?

PC1066 is the best for the P4, DDR400 is the fastest DDR type, DDR is best for the XP.

If you want top performance at a moderate price I suggest a P4 1.8A at 2.4GHz by overclocking to the 133MHz "533" bus speed, using PC1066 on an Asus P4T533-C.

If you want moderately high performance at a more reasonable price the Athlon XP1800+ on an MSI 745 Ultra motherboard looks like a great value. Minimum RAM speed of DDR266 (aka PC2100), DDR333 is better.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

What about on a P3? and out of curiosity, which do you think would be better, a P4 1.5-2.0GHz(depending on what I can afford) or dual P3's(1.0-1.2GHz)? I'm going to be using 3DSMAX/Cinema4DXL quite a bit so I need as much speed and memory as possible.

Most people can't get a large enough performance gain out of two processors to justify the expense. A P4 2.0GHz will work far faster for the majority of users than a Dual PIII 1.0GHz.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

Someone told me to make sure the motherboard I got had either a SCSI adapter or a RAID chip. Is that really important or do I not need to worry about it. and what is a RAID chip anyway?
also, if I go P4 am I going to have to worry about whether some of my hardware, like my videocard, will be compatible?

This has all been really helpful by the way, thank you.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by dobalina on 06/02/02 01:09 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

I wouldn't worry about it right now. If you ever need these things (which I doubt you will), you can add a PCI card for them.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

The best memory for the P3 is SDRAM. it was not designed to utilise DDR or RDRAM.

<font color=blue>Pants Down! Turn Around! Bend Over! You're about to Experience Telstra broadband!  

That would be a good test of memory architectures if you could get a PIII running on a DDR or RDRAM platform. Hummmm??? FatBurger and all, you ever seen a socket adapter for a PIII to socket 478 or to 462? Interesting...

I know that is a little off this original thread but it was just a thought.

<b>"Sometimes you can't hear me because I'm talking in parenthesis" - Steven Wright</b>  

I remember someone mentioning something like that a few days ago, but I assumed they just weren't clear on what they though they had, so I didn't worry about it. I didn't get a chance to inquire further. I would think it's either impossible, or difficult enough that nobody would bother.

<font color=blue>Hi mom!</font color=blue>

The P3 does have motherboards available for both RDRAM and DDR.

the RDRAM boards were all the rage just before the "camminogate" disaster and the malfunctioning MCH (northbridge).

was it the 820 or 840 chipset?
anyway the performance of RDRAM was far from stellar with the P3, and at the time even with the mega expensive PC800 RDRAM performance was... mediocre. the latency of RDRAM killed it.

as for DDR i remember toms hardware doing a review... earlier this year or late last year.
dont remember the name of the motherboard, but i do remember the performance benefits of using DDR. jack Squat. diddly. bugger all.

each CPU seems to be designed with one memory type as its optimal interface.

SDRAM for the P3, DDR for the AMD K7 series and RDRAM for the P4.

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Yup and everyone got free RDRAM modules from Intel to make up for it.

I forgot bout that whole MTH debacle. Yes, DDR was better than RDRAM. I keep thinking that RDRAM has evolved but it has only ramped up speeds, where DDR was a change in architecture from SDRAM. What was 2 years ago?

So coming back to the DDR vs. RDRAM architecture type and 'X' type processor. What is the biggest hindrance to chip architecture going forward.

1. Bandwidth between the CPU and the MCH?

2. Bandwidth between the MCH and the main memory? (I doubt it...should be the same...I haven't read anything stating otherwise.)

3. The Pre-fetch architecture itself?

4. Or some combination of all of these?

Back to you...

<b>"Sometimes you can't hear me because I'm talking in parenthesis" - Steven Wright</b>  

It was the i820. It worked fine with RDRAM, but didn't work with SDRAM (it had slots for both). They recalled them because of that. A friend of mine had a dead i820 and fixed it a few months back and was able to return it and get his money back :cool:



Well..."free" :tongue:

<font color=blue>Hi mom!</font color=blue>

well bandwidth from MCH/NB to ram is no problem, as shown by the kt333... its the cpu to MCH/NB and the inherent bottle necks thats the problem.

thats why the KT333 with asynchronous isnt much better than the Kt266A... and remember the KT266. with a improved northbridge the KT266A was streets ahead.

thats why hammer looks so good
No northbridge between mem & CPU. extremmly high bandwith with very few bottlenecks.

plus as i read on anandtech's, the difference between hammer chipsets should be alot less too, as the Northbridge will only be supplying periferal decives and such... will no longer be a part of the mem to cpu process.


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