registered vs unregistered ddr ram?

[doubleanti]

What's the difference between registered vs. unregistered ddr ram? Also I am thinking of buying a 2gig set of pc3200. Right now I have a gig and a half (a 1 gig set and a 512 set), but should I hold off to get a new motherboard/cpu/ram technology?

Thanks for the advice, just dropping by. =)

[VirtualAce]

RAM won't change for some time. It seems we have been stuck on the current DDR for at least a few years and will be for a few more. Even 64-bit CPU's are using basically the same RAM types. I think what is happening is we are simply opening the main CPU 'pipe' more and more thus able to cram more data through it. So speed now is not always a matter of faster memory and faster CPU....but a CPU and memory that can handle more bandwidth with the same speed.
I think PC3200 will stay around for some time. I'm also beginning to feel as if we have reached the peak speed when it comes to RAM since nothing better has come out for quite some time. It will probably take more technology to break the current 'barrier' that we are seeing in hardware.


I'm not sure what the diff between those types of RAM are and I'd only guess that perhaps thats another name for RAM that does parity checking as opposed to RAM that does not.

[SlyMaelstrom]

Registered RAM kind of acts like a buffer and amplifies the signal of the data sent to and from the memory, which reduces error when using a lot of RAM modules because the more modules the weaker the signal. ... or something like that. Registered RAM is more important in servers. The important thing is, one it's usually more consistent but it's always slower because the buffering takes an extra clock cycle. It also tends to go hand and hand with ECC (error code correction) in RAM which is a good feature to have. If you're looking for overclocking RAM, either go unbuffered or you may be able to turn off the buffering in the BIOS, but I couldn't guarantee that.

[doubleanti]

Hm, thanks for the input.

The reason I am wary about upgrading is that there is the DDR2 standard which has even higher throughput. And I think I'll be using this current machine for a long time. It is a P4 w/ HT at 3.0 GHz. It initially came with 512 ram but I bought a gig set for it making it 1.5 gig.

I use this box for research and the parsing takes six days to get through 6 million sentences of English. Though it is not certain that the bottleneck is memory, I do know that increasing the memory would increase performance because the analysis uses any and all memory avaliable.

So, with new RAM technology, and actually new HDD technology too (SATA II), should I hold off? When I first got the box, I was amazed by the new technology inside: new ram, new HDD standard, new video ports, so I'm a wee bit behind the times! Please help this old timer!

PS. Hi Bubba!

[SlyMaelstrom]

Well you can't switch to DDR2 if you have a motherboard with DDR memory slots because they're different sizes. For the videocard, I'm sure you probably have AGP slots, which is also outdated. The modern technology is PCI Express. Also your motherboard might not have any SATA II connectors, so that's probably out, too.

I would stick with what you have until you're ready to upgrade the whole computer. Computers seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper every year, if you ask me.

[Frobozz]

Sounds like you need the board I have - my motherboard has both DDR and DDR2 slots, both AGP and PCI-express 16x (although it runs as 4x), and is capable of using Core 2 Duo (although I think you have to flash the BIOS so a different processor is needed to do that - might be fixed by now though).

ASRock 775DUAL-VSTA