What's the better memory type for the P4 in terms of o/c'ing??

[revvy]

My friend has a dilemma and he's wondering what would be the best route to go... RDRAM or DDR RAM in order to gain MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE coupled with a P4 1.6A...
Furthermore.. my friend is wondering which mobo would be the best suited for either route... ABIT BD7 (Intel i845D chipset) for DDR along with the Soyo P4S Dragon (SiS 645 chipset) and the ABIT TH7-II (Intel i850 chipset) for RDAM....

 

[WaTaGuMp]

Hmm lets see I have a Soyo P41 Fire Dragon with a 2.0 at 2.4 with Crucial 2100 DDR. My friend has a Asus P4266 with a 2.2 at 2.5 with Mushkin High Perf 2100 DDR. I have him beat on the FSB issue but he has SCSI so the card might be the reason he cant overclock very high. For your friend the combo's you list are all good choices. lets also not forget the Asus with the 1.6 chip has gotten some great overclocks from users in here.

 

[eLm0]

If I recall correctly, Tomshardware did some sort of comparison between a highly-overclocked P4a with DDR versus a mildly-OCed one using RD, so check there for more info. The memory bandwidth of RD simply blows DDR out of the water, and more than makes up for the difference in CPU speed. I'm sure other ATers will echo my opinion of sticking with the TH7-II.

 

[Fant]

PC2700 should perform on par to PC800 so go with whatever is cheaper...hard to say which will be better in the long run as there are camps on both sides of the issues...

 

[Duvie]

This has been discussed here numerous of times....

1) does your buddy want to oc to just 133fsb??? if so with the right board the rdram may be able to do it...

2) does your buddy want near 2.4ghz like many around here have gotten??? won't likely get that pc800 rdram...


With 2) and pc2700ddr and a sis 333ddr chipset at 2.4ghz for a 150fsb...one could get 375mhz ddr and about 2800's in bandwidth...so it should keep the performance close....

If you go 1) you will likely get 3000 plus bandwidth scores but with the scarifice of much raw cpu power which I have seen first hand in many apps in far more important then the bandwidth...some programs just don't use it or need it, period....if not how do you compare a athlon which a sizeable deduction in theorectical bandwidth often beat the p4??? Cause the memory bandwidth is not that important in a lot of programs...

 

[dexvx]

Some poeple with extremely lucky RDRam have been getting to 150FSB (4x RD clock = 1200Mhz). But if you were interested purely in clock speed, you could set the RDram multiplier to 3x to maintain high overclocking potential.

However, best performance and the majority would say RDram (with either an Abit TH7II or Asus P4t-E). RDram is cheap now, Samsung Dual sided 256MB PC800 is $77 at google gear a piece.

Memory bandwidth is of course not important for apps like word or excel, etc (If you're using your computer for that then it doesnt even need a p4). In games it is important and in FPU-intensive apps it is also important. Athlons beat the p4 in FPU-intensive apps because it has a superior FPU. But with proper SSE2 optimizations, the p4 is on the same level as an Athlon, and added the memory bandwidth, it can beat an athlon.

In tomshardware, a p4-3000A (133FSB 166DDR memory) was beaten by a p4-2600 (118FSB 474MHz RDram) in the nearly every benchmark (with the exception of CPU-intensive apps)

 

[F155mph]

Kingmax DDR

 

[revvy]

Thanks for your comments guys!
My friend will probably end up going the RDRAM route for sure!

 

[Duvie]

try using ddr 333mhz memory (pc2700) then oc it to 420mhz memory like I have hit....tomshardware review like most of his were lame...lets compare true 333ddr chipsets with good pc2700ddr...I think the results would still be rdram's favor but would have closed that gap significantly....


Also lets not forget ocing ddr is easy on most every board where as he will need perfect conditions, and probably some luck to get those pc1200 numbers you suggest...

 

[dexvx]

Tom has been under a lot of criticism lately, but I don't think he would blatantly lie or purposely try to distort numbers.

Anyways, those are NOT 1200Mhz rdram (you would be a lucky SOB if you hit 1200), that is just RDram running at 474*2 = 928Mhz, not even 1066Mhz that most people with RDram run at. Granted 166DDR sdram isnt the highest you can go, but 928Mhz RD isnt even close to the highest it can go either.

Based on his system setup, he did use high quality ram: Crucial (Micron) DDR333 SDram. If you think those are "bad" quality then I would like to see some "good" quality. I know a guy on Anandtech overclocked his DDR ram to 400+Mhz, but he lowered the memory timing on them to something like 2.5 - 4 - 4 - 7. CL2 is something like 2 - 3 - 3 -5 if I'm not mistaken. Even though his memory bandwidth would be greater, his latency would be higher and probably degerenate his performance.

But I do concur that DDR will be easier to overclock, you just need to switch some FSB settings on any kind of SIS645/i845DDR board and you're fine.