RDRAM vs. SDRAM vs. Processor Speed

[Crichton2b]

Hi, everyone.

Im a student and Im wanting to buy a dell for around 2000dollars (up to
2100, even 2150 at the highest though). My main priorities:
At least 700mhz p3
128mb ram
A geoforce 32mbram card (not sure which kind to get...)
at least 20-30gb hd
A 19inch monitor
DVD drive
MS/Dell Natural Keyboard elite (I cant go back to the old keyboards, I type
like shit with them)..

And thats about it. Anyway I was wondering what everyone opinion is on
those different options, and more importantly the comprimise I have to set
up between what kind of Ram and the speed of the processor I can get (for
~2k).

Is there any place that shows the difference between RDRAM and SDRAM. For
example, if I have p3 700, one with 128sdram and one with 128rdram, how much
faster (in terms of %) would the rdram system perform?

Thanks,
noah

[Gary Higgins]

Do a search in Yahoo or another search engine for RAMBUS, RDRAM or "RDRAM
Benchmarks", and you'll find some of the benchmarks that have been done. From
what I've read, the performance difference is not that great, but RDRAM really
speeds up performance when running 2 or more applications at the same time.
It's designed for multi-tasking, and if you run 2 or 3 or 5 programs at the same
time, you'll really notice the speed improvement, and reduced frequency of those
nasty "memory overflow errors." You know the ones..."such as such overflowed
it's temporary memory area."

Also RDRAM comes in different speeds...PC400-600, PC700 and PC800. In order to
ensure you get the faster RDRAM, be sure to find out from your Dell Sales Rep.
I've read that ECC RDRAM comes in 700 and 800 MHz flavors, and non-ECC comes in
the slower 400-600 MHz flavors, yet no one on this newsgroup seems to be able to
confirm this. But several recent Dell purchasers have posted this before.

Gary.
----------

[Barry Spaulding]

In article <O8MpT#$1$GA.83@cpmsnbbsa07>,
Crich...@email.msn.com says...

>
>
> And thats about it. Anyway I was wondering what everyone opinion is on
> those different options, and more importantly the comprimise I have to set
> up between what kind of Ram and the speed of the processor I can get (for
> ~2k).
>
> Is there any place that shows the difference between RDRAM and SDRAM. For
> example, if I have p3 700, one with 128sdram and one with 128rdram, how much
> faster (in terms of %) would the rdram system perform?
>
> Thanks,
> noah
>

Do side by side configurations of your minimum system
requirements at Dell's web site. For the money I saved on
an XPS-T (100mhz SDRAM) over the XPS-B (P600 RDRAM), I added
10gig to my HD and went up to an 800mhz PIII - IMHO a better
value.

www.tomshardware.com and www.anandtech.com both have
benchmarks for RDRAM (P800 IIRC) which I found unimpressive.

bcs