Written By:
Date Posted: November 5, 2001

There was once a time when SDRAM ruled the roost. When Intel/Rambus pimped RDRAM, most people stuck with the vanilla SDRAM. The main reason was price, since RDRAM was easily 8x more expensive than a generic stick of PC100 Ram, and RDRAM's performance wasn't all that impressive. Granted, the Pentium 3 wasn't designed for RDRAM, but many loathed Intel for pushing us towards it. AMD on the otherhand stuck with PC100 (as well as PC133), which was cheaper, more readily available and performed plenty well enough for the majority of users.

With the Pentium 4, RDRAM began to flex it's muscle. It had a lot more bandwidth than SDRAM, and in certain memory benchmarks that really stress bandwidth, there was definently a difference. This won't make that much of a difference with current home apps, but multimedia authors and workstations benefitted from the increased bandwidth RDRAM provides. Either way, until the recent introduction of the i845 by Intel, SDRAM isn't on Intel's roadmap. AMD had other plans...

Although AMD wasn't exactly blown away in real world performance while still using SDRAM, it was becoming evident that they needed to replace it as their memory of choice. DDR ram, by then, was quite well known as the alternative that AMD would choose, and it had many advantages over SDRAM. It's faster, it didn't require a major memory redesign, and it wasn't expected to cost much more than what you were already paying at the time for regular SDRAM.

So what exactly is DDR? It's an acronym for Double Data Rate (or Ram, depending on who you ask), where it can process information on the rise and fall of any given clock cycle, and it's not limited to just the rising edge like it's predeccesor. Basically, it can do twice the work of regular SDRAM (Single Data), though in real world scenarios, it isn't twice as fast. DDR isn't as much as a new technology as it is an evolution of existing SDRAM. It's been around long before being introduced as a replacement for SDRAM. Starting with the original GeForce DDR, most modern video cards today use DDR, and it was only a matter of time before it made it's way to motherboards.

Upon launch, DDR was about 50% more expensive than SDRAM, but the prices quickly fell as more DDR enabled motherboards became popular and available. Leading the way for "cheap" DDR ram was Crucial Technology, . Launched November 1996 by Micron, the company was made for the end user/consumer to buy ram direct from the same place OEMs buy it. This assured compatibility as well as competitive pricing. Crucial cooks their own ram right here in North America, and being one of the largest memory manufacturers worldwide contributes to their low prices. Today we're going to put some under the gun. The price is right, but the question is, is it any good?

Specifications

" Module Size: 256MB
" Package: 184-pin DIMM
" Feature: DDR PC2100
" Configuration: 32Meg x 64
" DIMM Type: Unbuffered
" Error Checking: Non-parity
" Voltage: 2.5V
" SDRAM Timings:CL=2.5

 

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