memory bus speeds effect on games

[Money Fist]

how much of an effect does DDR speeds have on games compared to standard 133 RAM?

im curious because im running a AMD 1.6 Duron and its holding my back my ram to 133
i was woundering if i will feel much of an effect when i get my new CPU and run my ram at full 333

[lynx]

It won't make that much difference.

Your ram is running at 133MHz, but it clocks data on both the upstroke of the clock and the downstroke, so the effective data speed is 266MHz. When you increase the data speed to 333MHz you are actually only increasing the clock to 166MHz (half of 333MHz) so the speed has actually only increased by 25%.

Assuming you have let the mobo decide the memory timing from the SPD chip, it is likely that the settings at 133MHz will be tighter than at 166MHz, so there will be even less benefit from the increased speed.

The increase is worth having, but it isn't jumping from 133MHz to 333MHz, it probably won't be anything like 25%. You will see more performance increase from your new processor in any case, so determining the ram improvements is less noticeable except in artificial benchmarks.

[Money Fist]

ow well
will make sure i get a 3000XP to feel the power
ta any way