P4 with...

[lamer]

so, a friend of mine wants to buy a P4 system, but he wants to know if 256 MB SDRAM would decrease the P4 speed. (400 MHz FSB)

do you know an answer?

[Erick]

Don't buy a p4 system with sdram! They perform in many areas below a p3. Stick with rdram or better yet a get a ddr board like one based on the sis 645 or via p4x266. The perform quite well with out the high cost of rdram.

[lamer]

so, compared with a AMD XP 1700+ with 256megs DDR the p4 system would be very slow, hum?

[batboy]

You can never reach the full potential of a P-4 using SDRAM. Certainly an AMD running at close to the same speed or even a little less would perform faster in most benchmarks.

[theflyingrat]

SDR will slow a P4 system overall. However, you have to look at the cost and what you're going to use it for. For a lot of intesive coding/kernel compiling stuff, for god's sake get DDR or Rambus. However, the performance gap gets tougher to measure with...say....gaming.

All the benchmarks you see with P4s and SDR getting slapped around by Rambus machines are taken with a screen resolution of 640x480, to illustrate the effects the CPU and memory subsystem have on the game.

However, the performance gap narrows as screen resolution increases. In fact, by the time you hit 1280x1024, it makes little or no difference what kind of memory you have. It relies so much more heavily on the type of Video Card that the differences become almost imperceptable. Plus, you could save $100 on the motherboard and memory alone - and upgrade your video card instead.

Gaming machine - go SDR, unless you play at 640x480 :)

DVD decoder/Video editing/productivity - DDR or Rambus.