I'm about to upgrade my pc, what is different between RDR, DDR, & SDR RAM.?

and what is the best?

I'm going for a P4 1.8.

40gig HD (only using 10 of 20 at the moment)

 

it's going to have to last probably 2 yrs so i want to get a good one.

 

I bought a 486 once and this thing called a Pentium came out at the same time and I was kicking myself for ages.

don't want to make the same mistake again.

 

any idears lads?

 

 

Sorry but I'm not techy and can't answer. However, I also have a question for the same types of people who will be answering you :

 

My new PC claims to have a 40 Gb hard drive. I'm running XP Home and when I right click on Recycle Bin and then select Properties and then the "HDD C:" tab, it tells me my hard drive is actually 35.3 Gb. Should I be complaining ?

 

 

a p4 1.8 is gonna be plenty for about 18months. you might want to look at the new athlon xp range of processor as well supposed to be as quick but cheaper...scan and microdirect are doing 40 gig drives for £60 pounds but for 30 more you can slap in an 80 giger which should be more than enough..if you can go for the ddr memory but if you want to keep the costs down then a 256meg stick of pc133 ram is going out at a piffling 40 notes at the moment. hang fire on a graphics card if you can as the g3 range is about to become very affordable. my choice is a p4 chip but i know a lot of others who use and swear by the new athlons

SDR: SDRAM, normal bog standard RAM, PC133 runs at 133mhz, PC100 100mhz. Not very fast but ok really.

 

DDR: Double Data Rate RAM, this is like SDRAM but it works on both the rising and falling sides of the clock signal, thus making it 'virtually' twice the clock speed, this is much faster than SDRAM on the right setup, but i dont think ever twice the speed.

 

RDR: Rambus, intels BIG mistake, but the idea has picked up since P4, this RAM is INCREDIBLY fast when used in conjunction with a P4 CPU. Much MUCH faster than DDR, though it is astronomically expensive, oh well.

 

So if you can, then get RDR.

 

Also Hairsy, it is normal for you to lose part of an HDD after formatting (the same as a 1.44MB floppy that only has 1.38MB after formating. But im pretty sure it shouldnt take up almost 5GB!!! That seems pretty mad, you say from recycle bin, go to my computer and click on the hard disk icon under the Hard disk drives' section (what a coincidence ) ONLY CLICK ONCE on the side you wil be faced with a little thing under "details" saying "Total size - xxGB" that is the proper reported size not sure what recycle bin would tell you but i would imagine its the same. If I were you id be pretty pissed off with 5GB down the drain.

The only thing i coul think of is to look under windows NT disk manager to see if there is any 'missing' free space on the end of your disk, but im not too sure if the home version of XP has that on, ill try and find out for you.

Well said Mr Toole If it was me I'd go with the new XP Athlons from amd - www.amd.com I think. These have been proven to be faster than the P4 and yet run at lower clock speeds - Intel have a hard time ahead Price-wise they are also better - make up your own mind but I know which I'd go for.... Also - don't bother with anything but DDR with these processors - if you are skimping on memory then there's no point in paying the extra for a faster processor. I'm sure somebody will dissagree but thats from what I've experienced...

 

CheerZ,

 

Andy

Clarky,

 

Thanks very much for the advice. I've tried looking as you suggest and it says the same. Not totally impressed ! If you (or anyone else) has ideas, then please let me know. I can't believe anyone has really made a 35.3 Gb drive - or have they ?!

 

Dave

right hairsy, try this:

Click Start -> Run and put in diskmgmt.msc and press enter, hopefully this should bring up Local disk management service. If it does then you will be presented with a bar at the bottom showing your hard drive, if you have a white space on the bar anywhere this is unpartitioned drive space and a waste, if you ind anything else report back and ill give u further advice

That helps explain a bit ! It shows a total of 37.27 Gb available of which 1.96 Gb is shown as 'unallocated' and 35.31 Gb shown as 'Healthy'.

 

But still can't work out whether I should be p'd off about it !

 

Thanks again.

Personally Rick I have never liked Intel. Compaired to other CPUs they are greatly over priced.

The other main stream on is AMD.

At the moment Intel are into 2Ghz (2,000 Mhz) zone, nice and fast. AMD have the 2000+XP chip, which runs at 1.67Ghz (1,670Mhz)

But you may think that 2Ghz will be better?

It doesnt always work like that. Z is a 3litre Twin Turbo, a F1 car is a 3litre NA. So why does an F1 car have 900+BHP?

Intel have just bumped up the speed of the chips the Intel Pentium 4 chip is not too much different than the original Pentium 1 chip. There are a few extra commands on the chip, more cache and it runs faster.

AMD have gone through a different way. At the moment they have a 1.67Ghz chip called AMD2000+XP chip. They how ever have created a chip that works better with software, and every gamer knows that AMD out shines Intel in the gaming front.

Personally I would get an AMD.

Also an Intel 2Ghz chip alone is £350 from my local computer specialists

An AMD 2000+XP is £250.

An AMD 1800+XP which runs at 70 Mhz slower than the AMD 2000+XP is £208.

 

My verdict, Intel are good for business use. If you have 20 apps open at once, Intel 4 may be best. But if its for home use or small business, AMD all the way.

 

Here you go http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/index.html

Compairison between the Intel Pentium 4 2.2Ghz (£551) and AMD Athlon 2000+XP (£250)

 

Stuart

also bear in mind some motherboards will only take a certain kind of ram go for one that will take sd or ddr but you cant mix and match them you have to use one type

Abit did make a board that allowed you to mix the dimms, but it caused huge problems.

I'm just about to build a PC from scratch and have decided to go for an AMD Athlon xp 1800+ processor. They only cost about £135 and are supposed to be quicker than a P4 2GHz.

I'd also go for the DDR RAM, supposed to be a lot quicker than the other types.

Dave

Thanks lads for your help, i knew i could depend on you lot.

made things a lot clearer.

 

Better to ask someone who knows than get ripped off further down the line.

Cheers

well hairsy i think you should be peed off with 2GB 'missing' from your hard drive. Anyway that means that you should be able to expand that used part (partition) of your hard disk to fill the rest of your hard disk. Or another option would be to create another partition in this space, this would show up as an independant hard disk to windows but it just a part of your 1 disk. This sort of thing could be used to store important files that you would want to keep in the case of you having to format the first drive to reinstall windows (pretty likely knowing microsoft ). Come back to me with the option you choose . OF course there is the option to just leave it as it stands but having almost 2GB wasted space. Seems strange as to why that would happen thugh.

Does sound weird, yeah ! To be honest I'm not likely to fill my hard drive anyway - I'm hardly what you'd call a super user. But if there's a way to get it without hassle then that'd be good. Warren's going to pop round sometime and see if he can 'find' it for me ! If you've got any ideas then I don't mind what form it takes.

 

I remember when I was really proud of my 1.2 Mb 5.25" disk drive which was 80 track, double sided, double density. All my mates were still getting by with tape. Those were the days !

what you need is Partition magic 7 i think (might be 6, but 7 iirc) that will allow you to expand the used part to the whole drive, the software can be aquired from a few places allthough im not sure links would go down well with the new moderation rules (btw i think moderation is a bit pointless and just makes convos dull as dishwater)