[J Bradford]

I'm in a situation right now where I can get a nice Athlon XP 1700 with motherboard for pretty cheap, but no RAM. However the motherboard supports PC133 memory as well as PC2100+, and I have a lot of pc133 memory sitting around.

Is there going to be a huge bottleneck or anything if I temporarily use PC133 is this Athlon XP 1700 system? I would eventually be upgrading the RAM later but I would like to know anyone's thoughts on this as it can affect purchase descision.

Thanks!
-James

[soogarrush]

depends...

if speed is important to you.
more ram is always better, the more the merrier...pc133 and ddr is going to have quite a difference especially if you use speed intensive apps such as games and what not.

i had the same prob - 1280mb PC2100...or 512mb PC3200. since i dont play much games, i decided not to upgrade to faster ram...its not as fast, but ive got plenty to last hours in photoshop.

[J Bradford]

I dug up an article on toms hardware about the difference. You're right, application stuff is okay, but I do a lot of 3d work and the benchmarks were rediculous when it came to games.

[Giant Hamster]

just tossing a question out there...I might be complete off the mark...i might even be talking about food, hell I have no clue: But isn't rim faster than ddr?

[Awetopsy]

nowadays DDR is cheaper than PC133 anyways.. Sell off all your PC133 and buy more DDR


... well almost

[DrunkenMoNk]

I'd say stick with the SDRAM for fairly obvious reasons.

First CL 2.0 memory isn't as cheap as you might think, and that's the type of memory you should be buying if performance really matters to you. If you end up dumping your money on CL 2.5 DDR266 memory modules then you may as well have stuck with your PC133 memory modules instead. You'd in effect be wasting money on a performance yield that isn't more than 1-3% regardless of the application.

Second the system isn't some bleeding edge machine, getting DDR memory isn't going to make a significant dent on your systems performance especially on motherboards that support both DDR/SDRAM memory modules. Most of the time KT133a boards, which were just SDRAM outperformed the boards that supported both memory types in general (The Ali Magik boards come to mind). I don't know exactly what motherboard your using but I think it's safe to assume that it will be every bit as much of a bottleneck as your memory modules will be.

Third is basically you have SDRAM already, theres no need to switch over when you have the option to use what you currently own. This both saves you money and doesn't leave you with unused parts.

If you want examples of the price of DDR memory modules at CL 2.0 you can check some out here, their prices are fairly average so you can probably find things cheaper... just not significantly cheaper:

http://direct.mwave.com/mwave/ProdMEM-COR2100.hmx?UID=&CID=&updepts=MR-CORSAIR&DNAME=%3Cb%3EMemory+%2D+Corsair%3C%2FB%3E&back=ProdMEM-COR2100.hmx?

[DrunkenMoNk]

Hey Giant Hamster:

Yes, rim's are faster than DDR, but... Athlons don't use rim's, Rambus memory is Intel only.

Hope that helps.