SDRAM or DDR ? what's best for GS?

[Alberto R.S.]

Surfing these bullettin boards, I noticed that some people suggest to stick to SDRAM when building a Gigasampler/Gigastudio dedicated machine.
Why? Aren\'t DDR memories good?
If I\'d be about to build a new dedicated machine, would it be unconvenient to purchase a motherboard with DDR 2100 memories support?
Thanks in advance,

[Simon Ravn]

DDR is of course better, since it is faster than SD RAM.

[composer22]

Faster is good?...but so is RDRAM

However...SDRAM is good...because it is s-l-o-w!

[Alberto R.S.]

Composer22 and everybody else, could you be more precise in explaining: why the slower the better?

Thanks,

[Simon Ravn]

Composer22, as far as I can see, nobody asked about RDRAM....

And I guess Composer22 was joking. There is no advantage using slower RAM. DDR gives you x% improvement in RAM performance. I dont think DDR will give you much improvement. Harddrive, harddrive controller and PCI performance is more important, but still it doesnt hurt to go with DDR.

[Alberto R.S.]

Thanks a lot Simon,
that\'s what I always believed but I\'ve become curious after reading some advices on this forum.

Again, thanks for the help,

[killerbobjr]

If you are building a dedicated GS box, DDR RAM is overkill. In fact, anything over a Pentium III 800MHz with SDRAM is overkill. What is far more important is your hard drive speed. An 800MHz PIII with SDRAM and a 15K RPM, 4ms SCSI drive will stomp all over an Athlon 2200XP or Pentium IV 2.4G using DDR or RDRAM with an IDE 7200, 8.5ms drive. The faster CPU and RAM speeds will get you more NFX effects, but not more voices.

That being said, a modern IDE 7200 RPM drive can easily reach Gigastudio\'\'s 160 voice maximum, so SCSI these days is overkill as well.

[Jamieh]

I was gonna say, all you really need is an ATA-100 7200 RPM IDE drive and you are all set.