Some questions of SDRAM vs DDR

My dad likes to take a lot of photos with his digicam. He then edits them in photoshop. He would like it to be faster, I suggested he upgrade his motherboard, to get DDR but I don't know how much of an impact that might have.

Would increasing from a 1600+ to 2200+ make photoshop quicker? Do you think he should get the ram? Although he probably doesn't want to as that means taking apart the computer again.

DDR 0wnz SDRAM, though I wouldn't know if you could actually notice in Photoshop, though you probably would.

You will notice a difference with the faster bandwidth.

And an xp2200 is faster than and XP1600...but a lot of XP1600 can hit XP2200 speeds without much trouble so spending the money on the chip may not be needed Overclock

Just how much of a difference I am not sure- I have never run DDR at spec long enough to get used to it!

The rig I am using as I type this is an XP1600@1927mhz with 175mhz fsb- ddr is running at 350mhz: photos open up very quickly......

Well thing is this is for my dad. If you look at my sig, you'll see I do overclock

But for my dad, I would want something stable, reliable, quiet, and non-overclocked.

I feel you should get the mobo and DDR. Basically the SDram is already bottlenecking the 1600, it won't get much better if you put a 2200 inthere.

If your dad is running a decent KT133A board you should be able to tweak that RAM out - see how high you can take the timings and what not. and if the chip is unlocked try raising FSB and lowering multiplier. like run 9.5x145 instead of 10.5x133. Not really overclocking but sorta. KT133A can have dang good memory bandwidth if you tweak the system out.

Adding more memory might help as well, if he's using enough to dip into the swap file.

sb