Why buy DDR Memory?
In the last few months, the PC industry has been witness to some very exciting developments. Processors that were once considered fast (350-500MHz), have been supplanted by small squares of silicon which can easily run well over the 'magical' threshold of 1.0GHz. Still newer processors are on the drawing boards of chip designers which by the end of this year are expected to break the 2.0GHz+ barrier!
Along the way, there has been a push in the SDRAM manufacturing industry to have the present type of memory run faster, alongside the blazing processor speeds now available in the PC marketplace. The current iteration of SDRAM has begun to show its' limitations in memory bandwidth with both PC100/PC133 SDRAM platforms. By causing a bottleneck in the performance of these new processor speed demons, memory is starting to be the limiting factor to the question, "how fast can you go?"
DDRAM (Double Data Ram) evolved from the need to search out an alternative to SDRAM to free up this pressing bandwidth limitation.
What DDR memory to buy?
The the latest chipsets like the AMD Athlon XP at present the PC2700 DDR333
matches the bandwidth. Consider atlease 256MB DDR Memory as your bare
minimum when you buy. It would be good if you can investing in 512MB
PC2700 DDR333 as it will spare you the headache of doing a memory
upgrade in future. The peformance of the DDR memory module you buy depends
on the chips that make up the DDR module itself. Since the module is made
up of different memory chips the ultimate speed of your module depends on
all of them being able to reach the same speed.
For an example we can take the graphic cards of NVIDIA who on testing their graphics chips find the ones that can go to the highest speeds and sell them separately as their top chip, while the rest that do not quite reach the ultimate speed are sold as a slower speed processor. This way they get two products for the price of one. The same applies to memory chips. Some memory companies do the same for DDR PC2700 & DDR PC3200 (DDR333) & (DDR400) which can be slower memory chips that are able to reach the next speed level. So if you buy say DDR PC2700 you can at least be assured that it will work at 166MHz and a little more. This means that with the AMD Athlon XP FSB you can safely increase its speed and know that the DDR memory will work.
DR memory can only be used in systems designed specifically for DDR memory
What is DDR memory?
Why DDR Memory? What DDR Memory to buy?RAM Influence on Computer Performance
Memory Chipset Specifics (Intel, Via Apollo, SIS, AMD Chipsets)
How
Computer Memory Works?
How
much RAM is enough?
System
RAM Upgrade Issues
Websites
that sell Memory Upgrades
