HARDOCP tries to defend DDR ram over RDRAM for review

[JoeFrat]

Hey racerx, welcome to the darkside LOL.

Seriously though, you should try out a gigabyte ga-8ihxp. I think you'll be surprised just how fast a good rambus setup is right out of the box.

I've been using the p4t-e as a platform base most of the year. It's not the best overclocker because of the clockgens, but it has been far and away the most stable board I've ever used. I have 50 customers that have 70 plus machines and I've only had 1 machine that has given me any issues, and I'm pretty sure it's not the board itself.

Now if I can just convince intel to update the i850....

[Ronin_abx]

Well, RacerX I too hate and will never use RAMBUS, out of principle. The company is rotten and they can go down to hell for all I care. Yeah I may be a "Hater", but I hate for the right reason.

[stratjakt]

RDRAM 1066 is faster. It's the only type of ram that can saturate the P4's fsb right now, and that's that. We'll see how QDR ram and dual-layered DDR performs when it exists.

Frankly, IMO, it's just a matter of benchmarking for the sake of benchmarking. You aren't going to see any real difference in real-world apps. Your excel spreadsheets wont load faster, you wont see any higher framerates in UT2k3. A big DivX conversion job won't finish any faster. That being said, the price/performance ratio seems to tip in favor of DDR.

Unless stability is a factor, then (and this is based purely on anecdotal experience) RDRAM tips the scale back. It's hard to find a mobo that supports ECC DDR, and from all I've seen, it pays a huge performance price.

I'm assuming most of these high-end rigs are for gaming. To be honest, the games are just as fun on a p3 rig with PC133..

As far as the AMD/Intel thing goes. It's a lame argument. They're both giant corporations that don't give a rats *** about you. AMD isn't the underdog, they may have a smaller share of the PC CPU market, but pump out practically as much silicon as Intel does, and reap gigantic profits. It's not david v. goliath, its goliath v goliath, and cheerleading for one side or another because you want the 'little guy' to win is dorky.

All of these review sites are indeed biased. It's like reading a review of the PS2 in Nintendo Power magazine.

I take everything I read with a grain of salt. It's kind of a bad marketing idea, they'd do much better to target the corporate world with promises of stability, than the gamer/enthusiast with promises of higher clockrates. I build myself 1 or 2 systems a year - but order thousands of rigs for clients, and have yet to have one request an Athlon workstation.

That said, I have two reasons to stick with Intel, that have nothing to do with what the latest benchmark says is 'faster'.

1) I'm a coder, and I can't guarantee some inlined asm will perform properly on an Intel platform if I've coded and profiled it on an AMD.

2) Go to Tom's Hardware and watch the videos of what happens when you remove the heatsinks on both proc's. The P4 detects an overheated condition (~75 C), slows to a 50/50 duty cycle, and if it persists (~95 C), shuts off. 90% of the time it shuts down cleanly with no damage. AMDs go boom, getting as hot as 300 C! This is pretty important to a guy like me who leaves his PCs on all the time, alot of that unattended. (It's cheaper than heating my house with my vintage McCarthy-era oil furnace)

The first I could easily accomplish by testing and profiling my code in the office. If AMD had the same or better thermal protection, I'd have no problem building my next home rig around it.

When yer up over 2ghz, you're really just benchmarking for the sake of benchmarking. Thats a hella-lot of CPU horsepower. Whether you get 3200 MFLOPS or 3250 isn't going to matter.

It's like "whats faster, a corvette or a porsche?". It doesn't matter, the speed limit is 65, so just buy what you think is prettier, what'll be cheaper to maintain, or whatever other criteria you can think of.