How much faster is a DDR motherboard?

[kgeissler 0]

How much faster is a DDR motherboard compared to one that uses SDRAM?

[Dirty Harry 0]

I guess its difficult to put a precise figure on it, but on several crediable sites I've seen a figure of 10-15% mentioned. Also, if you look at SiSofts reference benchmarks that seems to be about right.

 

H.

[Preacher 0]

from my point of view, DDR Ram is completely useless. You get 30% performance increase a t b e s t!

 

Here´s an example:

 

your favorite shooter only does 10 fps with normal Ram. Go buy this DDR stuff and if you´re lucky you´ll see the fps go up to 13,3 fps. Right, still a slideshow.

 

Now you pay some bucks for some high end quality hardware, but still use normal Ram. Your shooter now runs flawlessly at 100fps. Go plug in some DDR Ram and look at your game again. Whoa, great, it´s running at 130fps. The only thing is, you can´t tell the difference...

 

Save the cash you wanted to put into DDR Ram for a faster CPU / Graphics board. Your system performance will benefit more from these than RAM.

[Brian Frank 0]

Then why upgrade at all unless your new rig is at least twice the speed of the old one? DDR is worthless? I'll argue that one: DDR vs. SDR in video cards, raise the resolution and color depth and watch the DDR cards generally stomp the SDR ones.

A video card can do a lot, true, but DDR does help to prolong your system's useful life. So you can't tell the improvement in current games, big deal! It won't hurt for future games now will it. If I was buying a new board now, I'd definitely be looking at DDR ones.

Also, if you've got an older system, you may not see any improvement if the system doesn't have enough muscle to make use of that new card.

[Dirty Harry 0]

Well, some of us have this genetical defect that causes sleepless nights if there is something faster out there. To various degrees obviously. Some tinker with vintage cars, some with PC:s...

 

Agreed, a faster video card is propably the best upgrade for a lot of ppl.

 

Anyhow, I'm not saying keep your CPU and upgrade just to get DDR(this thread wasn't really about upgrading at all). But if you need to upgrade the mobo and the CPU, you might as well throw in some DDR and get the added bandwidth. And I hear there are people building a new computer from scratch- why not go for DDR ?

 

I agree with Brians basic principle, my last upgrade was from a Athlon 800 on a Abit KA7-100 to an Athlon 1400@1600 on a Abit KG7 with DDR. And it is twice as fast. Maybe I'll sleep well for a few more weeks, if it wasn't for the fact that I really, really wonder what that Geforce 3 Titanium would benchmark at...

 

H.

 

 

Lian-Li 60 USB with Enermax EG365P 350W Power supply

KG7-Raid MoBo

Athlon 1400/266 (cooled by a Swiftech MC462-A)

256 MB Mushkin Hi Perf. 2100 DDR CAS2-2-2-2 (one stick)

IBM 45,0 GB (75 GXP -DTLA 307045) 7200 rpm ATA100

IBM 27,3 GB (34 GXP -DPTA 372730) 7200 rpm ATA66

Asus V-7700 AGP (Nvidia Geforce 2 GTS), 32 MB DDR SGRAM

Advansys SCSI Controller

SCSI Iomega Jaz drive

Hauppage Win/TV Theater (model 498) PCI

Asus 50x CD-R

Ricoh 7040A CD-RW (firmware upgraded to a 7060A)

Soundblaster Live! 1024

Cambridge Soundworks speakers

3COM Dynalink 3C905C-TX-M Network Card

Philips 21' Monitor 21B582BH

HP Laserjet 6L

HP Deskjet 970 Cxi

Canon D660U Scanner

Logitech Trackman Marble FX

MS Intellimouse Optical USB

MS Natural Keyboard Pro

Linksys Etherfast Cable/DSL router BEFSR41

Motorola Cable Modem (12/00)

Local LAN (three PC's)

Windows 2000

[kgeissler 0]

The reason I had asked is because I am upgrading.

 

I just bought 512MB of SDRAM about 3 weeks ago. I am now going to be upgrading my CPU/Motherboard. I am just wondering if I should eat the cost of the memory I just bought and get a DDR motherboard. Or get a SDRAM motherboard and save some money.

 

I want to get the Athlon XP now that it is out. But that is more money than the 1.4ghz Thunderbird I was going to get. Just not sure how to spend my money.

 

Just in case you are wondering, this is what I have now:

 

Abit KA7

Athlon 800 Slot A

640MB SDRAM

Geforce2 GTS 32MB

[JP- 0]

DDR on video cards just happens to be probably the most worthwile use for it brian, the memory was the bottleneck on those cards (and i suppose still is) so anything that increases the memory bandwidth has to be good. With cpus its totally different, the athlon wasnt really designed with ddr specifically in mind so it doesnt give you a huge performance increase. On the other hand the p4 seems to need a big memory bandwidth to do anything worthwhile, thats why the 845 sucks so much

 

And of course if your buying a new board you wouldnt really want an sdr 1 would you

 

I think preacher got it spot on there not much of a difference but its worth it over the sdr boards. And remember memory benchies arnt everything, you can see what the p4 gets in the sandra tests but the athlon can whooop it at a much lower clock speed in real life games, and with a much lower memory score.

[Preacher 0]

Actually, my current system is more than three times faster than my old one. The advantage of DDR Ram can always be gained if not surpassed by OC´ing your CPU and/or graphics board (if you feel to do so). You won´t even need better cooling...

 

Sure it is better to have all three: the fastest processor available, the fastest graphics card and the fastest RAM. But if you can´t afford all this expensive stuff, DDR Ram is the last one I´d invest in.

 

If you don´t do rendering, compiling, cutting movies or ripping DVD´s for your own archive, then DDR would be a waste of cash.

 

The name "DDR" suggests RAM that is twice as fast as SD-Ram. As long as this isn´t the case (read my first post about the current speed improvements), I can happily live without DDR.

 

Plus, a computer magazine I´ve subscribed to says that if performance increase stays below 30%, the user won´t notice it at all.