P4 400mhz or 533mhz - question

[RAR]

My question is this: If you have a motherboard and P4 2.4ghz processor (Northwood) at 533mhz like the Intel 850E chipset with RAMBUS PC800 memory then it would run pretty good. Now if you had the 845 chipset that uses DDR RAM PC2100 and you had the same P4 2.4ghz(Northwood) at 533mhz wouldn't it just be bottled-necked by the 266mhz ddr memory? Wouldn't it be about the same speed as if you used a P4 2.0ghz at 400mhz? Any clarifications or explanations are appreciated.

RAR

[Jeordiewhite]

RAR, why would you want to use pc2100? pc3200 would kick the crap out of rambus at 533.
Yes the slower memory would slow it down a bit, It would not extremly cramp it's style though.

[Dokeman]

it wouldnt necessarly be a bottleneck, both systems would haul arse. Its just that the P4 was designed to run with Rambus. And even using PC800 on a 533chip would be a so called "bottelneck" vs using 1066 Rambus. And it also depends if you are wanting to overclock or not. i dotn believe that the rambus would go as high as DDR. I believe that 1066 rambus is just high quality PC800 that can take the 133fsb.

And no it would be as slow as a 2gig chip. But, its is hard to say it would be faster or slower that this or that. It depends on what yor doing. Ifs its CPU intensive stuff, they will both be the same cause there both 2.4ghz. If you are doing memory intensive stuff, then the Rambus would be a little faster, but the CPU isnt going at 100 percent so it would really matter. It really depends on what you are wanting do it. If you after a 3dmark score, get the rambus. If you after a kick-a$$ system get the DDR and put the extra cash towards more ram, faster CPU, for better graphics card.

[RAR]

Here's why I asked the question. A friend of mine is looking a getting a Dell system. Here are the two options:

Pentium® 4 Processor at 2.40GHz with 533MHz system bus/ 512K L2 Cache with 256MB DDR SDRAM

or

Pentium® 4 Processor at 2.0GHz with 400MHz system bus/ 512K L2 Cache with 512MB DDR SDRAM

Would they both be pretty much equal? Which do you guys think would be the best combination (and don't say the 2.40 with 512MB).

Thanks for the quick responses....

[thekingofpain]

The 2.4 with 533 (sorry)
266=533 ddr
The rambus 1066 will outperform anything but the best quality ddr (easily available and my choice, since rambus is fizzling) now...