DDR vs SDRAM? 768 MB vs 1.5GB?

[hella356]

I'm going to build a new 1.4 GHz Athlon PC to run DesignStudio and I'm at the point where I need to decide whether to use a VIA KT133a based or AMD 760 based motherboard. I can get an Epox KT133a and 3 sticks of 512 MB SDRAM for a little over $300. A Giga-Byte 760 board with 3 DIMM slots is almost $200 plus another $150 or so for 3 256MB sticks. 512 Sticks of DDR are about $200 each so that really adds up to a lot of $$. Would I be better served to go with the higher amount of slower RAM or will 768 be sufficient at least until the 512 sticks come down in price? I know the AMD board will be overall faster and probably more stable, I'm just not sure if that offsets the larger amount of RAM I could use with a VIA board. It will also be using a SoftQuadro-ed 64 MB GF2 Pro.

[mechadeath]

Well I guess it depends on how much ram you need. I havd 768pc133 and it wasn't enough to paint and animate all at once so my 1.5 should be coming in today The ddr from what I understand really isn't worth the money for the speed increase you get. Not sure what your budget is but if you get 768ddr jsut to wait for the 512's then you have to buy ram again...wasted money I would think. Up to you though.

[hella356]

Overall the AMD chipset is what I'm really interested in since it's the most stable Athlon chipset, the speed is just a bonus. Also the ability to eventually go as high as 3 gigs of RAM is nice with the AMD board although I don't know if more than 1.5 is really needed. So my concern is that 768 is not going to cut it. Does DesignStudio tend to run badly at 768mb compared to 1.5gb? If 768 is generally sufficient than I can live with replacing RAM with larger sticks down the road since I can just put the 256 sticks in another machine. Thanks.

[hella356]

Well, with the imminent release of the 4 DIMM slot Tyan Tiger dual AMD board at $250 I think I'm looking at 1 Gig of RAM. Obviously 1024mb is better than 768mb and that much closer to 1.5g so I think I've got my answer. The potential of going dual CPUs down the road is also looking great.

[kiwi]

not to be a smart-alec, but unless you guys are going to be doing film or HD-res renders, you probably won't see an increase in performance (either GUI or rendering) over 768MB.

overall system performance gain using DDR over SDR is way less than 10%.

I'll bet anybody 50 bucks if they can proove otherwise.

kiwi