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Originally posted by DGhost
wow... so many things i could respond to.... where to start where to start..
if you care about performance and run Win2k or XP you will get a better level of performance out of 512MB of PC133 memory than you will 256MB of PC2700 on an nForce...
about the comments on HD cache... keep in mind it took the 8MB WD drives to come to the level of performance the IBM's offered with """only""" 2mb of cache.
just because the chipset handles memory timings faster doesn't mean that everything is going to magically go faster...
OS booting is pretty much entirely hard drive/processor dependant. the nForce2 is not going to load faster than the same system with a SiS chipset. you are going to see this performance difference when running things that stress the whole system (games, for instance) but not many other times. in most desktop work you will never notice the performance difference.
and the same thing goes for processors... unless you are stressing the processor, you will not notice the performance difference..
and, if you have only 256mb of ram in your system, it doesn't matter which chipset you run. you pop open any recent game and its gonna be fairly choppy as it has to swap out to the hard drive. even if the hard drive is "slower" it will still run things faster with 512mb of ram than it will with 256.
If you wanna compromise, 384MB of ram is a good amount. that gives it enough headroom that most games (at least the older ones) run fine, but the next generation games might have issues. its wiser just to get the 512.
wow... so many things i could respond to.... where to start where to start..
if you care about performance and run Win2k or XP you will get a better level of performance out of 512MB of PC133 memory than you will 256MB of PC2700 on an nForce...
about the comments on HD cache... keep in mind it took the 8MB WD drives to come to the level of performance the IBM's offered with """only""" 2mb of cache.
just because the chipset handles memory timings faster doesn't mean that everything is going to magically go faster...
OS booting is pretty much entirely hard drive/processor dependant. the nForce2 is not going to load faster than the same system with a SiS chipset. you are going to see this performance difference when running things that stress the whole system (games, for instance) but not many other times. in most desktop work you will never notice the performance difference.
and the same thing goes for processors... unless you are stressing the processor, you will not notice the performance difference..
and, if you have only 256mb of ram in your system, it doesn't matter which chipset you run. you pop open any recent game and its gonna be fairly choppy as it has to swap out to the hard drive. even if the hard drive is "slower" it will still run things faster with 512mb of ram than it will with 256.
If you wanna compromise, 384MB of ram is a good amount. that gives it enough headroom that most games (at least the older ones) run fine, but the next generation games might have issues. its wiser just to get the 512.
RAM does't make the system faster, it just helps not slowing it down. Right now the sweet spot for XP (price/performance) is 256MB (DDR).
Of course will see a difference (if you _benchmark_ it) by adding more RAM. And 512MB PC133 IS slower than 256MB DDR unless you're working with large sets of data that don't need "moving" much. So, yes,then 512MB is better than 256MB. Only because it's a matter of storage, not MEM speed (since 256MB would induce swapping data from the HDD). Things look different when you need to feed the CPU with data coming from RAM (given the data is not too big for it). The Athlon has a 2.1GB/s bus, which is alien territory for PC133.
BTW, IBM haven't been at the top of things IDE since a while ago. The previous speed champion was Maxtor. The actual king is Western Digital. The fact that they "needed" 8MB cache is to beat drive xx is irrelevant. They're the fastest is all that matters. And the WD400Jb is also the cheapest of the 8MB drives. [IBM released the 180GXP with 8MB too, but they're still slower than the WD and you can only get the 8MB on 2 drives, the 120 and 180GB].
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