Rambus vs DDR ram

I noticed that support for Rambus ram has deminished in favor of DDR... why is this? I know DDR is cheaper but the newer Rambus sticks are fast and don't require pairs.

I was looking at mobos for a P4 and had hard luck finding anything that uses Rambus, most of it is DDR. I found one board the I am interested in but I am afraid by the time I come up with the cash, the board will be replaced with DDR. The board is a Asus 4T533. The sucker is spendy, that is, if you want the stick of Rambus with it.

So, is Rambus played out? Should I give up and go with the grain and get something that does DDR? Should I continue with my plan on staying against the grain and hunt down boards that will run a P4 @ 3Ghz that use Rambus like I want?

This is not about what CPU I want. I know what I want and it is going to come at a price. This is about Rambus. This is not about if I should or should not make a system that supports Rambus. I want to hear your two cents on this. I have seen only a handful of boards from Intel that support Rambus, most does DDR and some does SDRAM. Looks like Intel is shying away from the stuff.

How do you stand on this?

Rambus is still faster than DDR.

For now.

But since either way you'd have to upgrade your board to supplement your FSB, and RAM bandwidth. The choice is yours.

A p4 with rambus 1066 running at 533 FSB beats the athlons by 2 times in memory transfer.

I run an AMD system, and I'll admit, a p4 2.5 Ghz+ with rambus 1066 beats the amd any way you put it in almost all disciplines, almost. ;)

Overall though, the p4 system would beat the amd system, but at a cost/performance ratio, the AMD wins.

You can always pay a larger amount for a minimal speed increase in most areas. Like I said, the only thing that really is an extreme difference is memory bandwidth, which is nearly a 2x increase.

No disrespect to DigitalError, but he's completely wrong !

Please read this post...
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...hreadid=214962

We have just set DigitalError straight with a few home truth's. Dual Channel DDR (as it reads in the above post) is... and always will be faster, as RD-Ram is being phased out soon to make way for new generation DDR.

For what you would pay for a 128 RD, you can have a 256mb DDR PC2700... need i say more?

Regards,

Paul.

Quote:

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Originally posted by DiGiTaIErRoR
Rambus is still faster than DDR.

For now.

But since either way you'd have to upgrade your board to supplement your FSB, and RAM bandwidth. The choice is yours.

A p4 with rambus 1066 running at 533 FSB beats the athlons by 2 times in memory transfer.

I run an AMD system, and I'll admit, a p4 2.5 Ghz+ with rambus 1066 beats the amd any way you put it in almost all disciplines, almost. ;)

Overall though, the p4 system would beat the amd system, but at a cost/performance ratio, the AMD wins.

You can always pay a larger amount for a minimal speed increase in most areas. Like I said, the only thing that really is an extreme difference is memory bandwidth, which is nearly a 2x increase.

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First of all, PC2700 vs PC1066 RDRAM is a theoretical 1.5x performance increase (2.7GB/sec vs. 4.2GB/sec), and that isn't even factoring in latency of dual-channel RDRAM which is probably even higher than you were when you wrote that post.

Take dual-channel DDR on the nForce2 for example, it's faster, but not anywhere even close to 2 times the speed, since dual-channel = latency. Same with something like RAID 0- theoretically it's 2 times faster, but in real life it's faster, but not even close to 2x faster.

Just because the memory bandwidth is 50% faster, probably more like 20% once you factor in latency, doesn't mean the system performance is a whole ton faster.