Upgrade: SDram or DDram?

**dustyrun** · March 25th, 2002, 02:24 PM

Hey Folks,

I currently have:
PIII-1gig
512 meg sdram
hard drive-40 gig
hard drive- 27 gig
sould blaster live 5.1
Liteon DVD/48x CDrom
Plextor 16-12-40
Radeon 8500
altec lancing 4.1 speakers
Viewsonic PF790 19"

I am going to upgrade to a 1.9 gig. I will see a large improvement no matter which way i go on the ram.

When i upgrade it will have all the same parts as above except for the following:

PIV-1.9 gig
Motherboard- {have not decided yet due to ram question}
512 meg ram

My question is with me doing a major upgrade would it be advisable to go to the DDRam or us the SDRam at 133?
The price difference would be about $100 between the board and the ram.

Is it worth it????

thank in advance,
Rick

Note: it is used for heavy 2d cad work mainly.

**ryogenetic** · March 25th, 2002, 02:32 PM

I would upgrade the ram, too DDR I have a AMD system running 768mb of DDR. With the OC possiblities of a P4 I would go with DDR just to max the combo of ram/cpu to the point of instability.

RYO

**willy_ph** · March 25th, 2002, 02:41 PM

If you're moving to a 1.9 gig P4, you'll definately notice a dramatic improvement if you DDR ram rather than SD ram.

If it was me making the decision I would go the DDR route.

**AuraEdge** · March 25th, 2002, 02:51 PM

The PIV needs high ram speeds to perform well. It is much more RAM intensive than either the Athlon or the P3.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboa.../i845d-05.html

Unfortunately, I couldnt find any benchmarks putting the P4 SDR SDRAM (i845) solution against a high speed P3...its all P4 vs Athlon these days

**ocit** · March 25th, 2002, 02:56 PM

ddr , step into the future. lol

**dustyrun** · March 25th, 2002, 03:29 PM

Thanks for the quick reply.
Looks like i will be getting ddram for this upgrade.
By the way it has XP Pro on it.
Again thanks.

Rick

**ironforge** · March 25th, 2002, 06:00 PM

Yes.. if at all possible go with DDR because it is more speedy

**dustyrun** · March 27th, 2002, 01:10 PM

well folks,
I finally did it. I got my first Athlon.

Athlon 2000+
Asus A7V266 MotherBoard
512 Kingston ddram
Antec 1030 case
and all the components listed above.

in 3dmark2001 the score raised from 5600 to 7400. no o'clocking

**willy_ph** · March 27th, 2002, 02:18 PM

Good cal dustyrun. Welcome to the otherside.

**dustyrun** · March 27th, 2002, 04:30 PM

iguess i finally when and did it!!!!!
got hold of
1: asus a7v motherboard
2: 512 meg pc2100 kingston
3: athlon xp 2000+

works like a charm so far. installed and open office 2000 pro in 5 min 15 sec.
sounds like a killer to me.

Any Good Guys?????

I have always run in an antec 1030 case with all fans included.

**Emc2** · March 27th, 2002, 05:10 PM

Just keep it cool...you're not using the stock fan on that are you? Good choice with 512MB of RAM with WinXP--now get rid of your swap file.

**thekemp** · March 27th, 2002, 05:12 PM

i currently have a sis 645 based mobo with pc2700 memory(333) this is nearlly as fast as rambus for a cheaper price. if your getting a 1.9 p4 DDR 2100 memory should be fast enough to not choke the p4 too much.