P3 and DDR?!?!?!

[Garasaki]

So I was strolling through ebay today, and noticed someone was selling a Soyo MB for a P3 that supposedly supported PC1600/2100. Anyone heard of anything like this and does it work well at all? I mean, I know P3 is pretty worthless at this point in time, but this is intriguing...

 

[upec]

The only DDR chipset available for P3 is from VIA. It does not have good performance.

 

[Crashman]

Also ALi made one.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[Crashman]

PIII is still a competant processor. The PIII 1.4GHz Tualatin has 512k cacne and will most likely beet an XP1500+ in many benchmarks. And it's overclockable. But way overpriced.

Anyway, it has been shown that having the memory bus bandwidth higher than the CPU bus has little to no performance gain on ANY processor. The only good reason I can find to use DDR is if you wanted to get away with extreme overclocking, and could set the memory bus speed slower than the CPU bus speed. a perfect example is how some people ran the PIII 500E at 1000MHz/200MHz FSB. To do that they had to run the memory speed slower, at 3/4 the CPU bus, killing 1/4 of their performance. But if you were to use DDR memory at that slower bus speed, it would still allow you to have more than adequate bandwidth, because it's DDR.
If the board supports the 133/100/33 setting, you get the advantage mentioned above; with DDR, you can raise the CPU bus to a higher speed while maintaining supportable speed on the memory bus and have DDR compensate.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[bront]

I was more suprised to find the P3 RDRAM computers that we have at work. Didn't understand the point of it, especialy with the extra latency you get when changing clockspeeds from 100 to 133.

Trollin' trollin' trollin', keep them doggies postin', my fingers are swollen, Rawhide!

 

[AMD_Man]

Crashman, PC1600 has longer latency than PC133 so you still lose some performance.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[Crashman]

Oui, but using the 133/100 setting would allow you to get your bus speed up to 200/150, using Cas2 PC2400 (which runs at 150MHz, for those who didn't know) would keep you on top.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[AMD_Man]

Ohh yeah, when you overclock, you get to PC2100 performance, or even better PC2400 performance!

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[Crashman]

Yes! Ideally, a chipset would allow you to take the FSB to 266 and leave the memory speed at 133, using DDR to make the bandwidth the same, but this world is not ideal.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?