Hi everyone,
I'm looking at building a cheap gaming computer for my brother, and I've settled on just about every component other than the RAM. Basically, he wants the fastest he can get for the least money, and since I have an old Athlon 1.4 Thunderbird system lying around with 2 sticks of DDR266 memory, I was thinking about having him use those to cut costs. With a new Nforce4 board he should be able to run them in Dual Channel; however, I was wondering what kind of performance impact could be expected from the lower bandwidth. After looking at some benchmarks here on THG and my own system, I've ended up a little puzzled. On my own system I'm running a Athlon 64 3500+ with a gig of Corsair XMS Pro, and I tried underclocking my RAM to 266 to see how much it would affect FPS. The max performance differential I've experienced was 6%, with the most being 5 frames per second in UT2004. In Doom 3 the difference is barely measureable, around 2-3%. Yet, after looking at various posts in this forum, people are claiming that DDR2100 is 55% slower, and as such real performance gaps will be around 15-20% or so. Of course, if I was running a more memory intensive game such as Quake III, I'm sure I could expect larger gaps, maybe up to 25-30 FPS. The only thing is, these games are already running in the hundreds of frames per seconds anyways, so it doesn't even matter. From anyone who's actually upgraded their RAM in a modern game like Half-Life 2, what is the max performance difference you've ever experienced, and is it worth not going with the "free" sticks I already have and buying completely new ones instead? Remember, the goal here is buying the most performance for the money, and no money at all means a basically infinite performance/price ratio, assuming the DDR266 runs fast enough in the first place.
I'm looking at building a cheap gaming computer for my brother, and I've settled on just about every component other than the RAM. Basically, he wants the fastest he can get for the least money, and since I have an old Athlon 1.4 Thunderbird system lying around with 2 sticks of DDR266 memory, I was thinking about having him use those to cut costs. With a new Nforce4 board he should be able to run them in Dual Channel; however, I was wondering what kind of performance impact could be expected from the lower bandwidth. After looking at some benchmarks here on THG and my own system, I've ended up a little puzzled. On my own system I'm running a Athlon 64 3500+ with a gig of Corsair XMS Pro, and I tried underclocking my RAM to 266 to see how much it would affect FPS. The max performance differential I've experienced was 6%, with the most being 5 frames per second in UT2004. In Doom 3 the difference is barely measureable, around 2-3%. Yet, after looking at various posts in this forum, people are claiming that DDR2100 is 55% slower, and as such real performance gaps will be around 15-20% or so. Of course, if I was running a more memory intensive game such as Quake III, I'm sure I could expect larger gaps, maybe up to 25-30 FPS. The only thing is, these games are already running in the hundreds of frames per seconds anyways, so it doesn't even matter. From anyone who's actually upgraded their RAM in a modern game like Half-Life 2, what is the max performance difference you've ever experienced, and is it worth not going with the "free" sticks I already have and buying completely new ones instead? Remember, the goal here is buying the most performance for the money, and no money at all means a basically infinite performance/price ratio, assuming the DDR266 runs fast enough in the first place.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram