What should i get Dell 4550 or 8250?

DuoEnigma · Post by **DuoEnigma** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 7:53 am

What should i get Dell 4550 or 8250?

both are generally the same, however what's different is ram!

the 4550 is SDram and the 8250 is RDram.

I want to get a around 1gb of ram

With the 4550 i can get 1gb of ram for $300!!!
With the 8250 i can get 1gb of ram for $900 something!!

however what the guy in dell said was that if get a 512Rd rams it equals the same as 1gb Sdram. Does anyknow know if this is true?

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 8:58 am

First off:
Premade computers suck I think I told someone that already, MEGA RIP OFF.
</rant>

SDRAM will KILL a Pentium 4's performance. P4 was designed with RDRAM in mind so it works much much better with it. DDR is much more popular and some-what cheaper then RDRAM and while P4+DDR isn't as fast as P4+RDRAM, ddr is still a okay subsitute. Regular SDRAM is not however!

What the DELL guy told you is extremely stupid, there is no way you can say that 512MB = 1GB, it's just NOT TRUE. Once you get around 0.5GB you probably wouldn't notice a difference if you added more ram. However it's still no exscuse to say 1GB = 0.5GB :\

Anyways :O

Mr Pilkington · Post by **Mr Pilkington** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 11:17 am

Why blow $1000's. Its called Pricewatch.com. Look into it. Don't know much about building systems, that's okay too! Go to your local Book-a-million or Barnes & Noble and snag a cheepy A+ guide. It's that simple.

jonmartensen · Post by **jonmartensen** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 1:00 pm

Stay away from RDRAM!

Don't go near it, consider it hazerdous material.

Actually that's my personal opinion, but I don't see RDRAM becoming the baseline for the Ram industry.

The only problem is, the Pentium 4 really can't function its best using anything other than RDRAM (which peeves me, but the backdoor dealings of Rambus Inc. and Intel are not necessary for this). If you are going with a pre-made computer (and are purchasing it in the near future) and it has Pentium 4 in it, go with the RDRAM.

As a side note, if you do go the route of building it yourself, a new Dual DDR platform is coming out for the Pentium 4 with the Granite bay chipset. For the drop in price (sith only a slight drop in speed) I think it would be worth the wait for it. Plus most of the Mobo's using the chipset are decked out with all the features (AGP 8X, USB 2.0, Gigabit LAN, 5-6 pci, 2 serial, 1 parallel, 2 IDE RAID with serial ATA, Realtek 6 channel surround sound, and firewire)

FurryCurry · Post by **FurryCurry** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 2:46 pm

klinky wrote:
What the DELL guy told you is extremely stupid, there is no way you can say that 512MB = 1GB, it's just NOT TRUE. Once you get around 0.5GB you probably wouldn't notice a difference if you added more ram. However it's still no exscuse to say 1GB = 0.5GB :\

Anyways :O

Generally I agree with the other posters here, but for the fact I've seen Premiere eating 700+ megs of ram while working on a video. 512 is more of a good "middle ground" amount, but for video editing, etc. I prefer larger numbers.

If you or whoever is paying doesn't mind spending the money, and wants the computer right now, go for the RDRAM.

Otherwise, wait a couple months for large OEM's like Dell to start advertising their high end P4 systems as having both DDR & Gigabit ethernet. Those will almost certainly be Granite Bay systems, which you should be able to confirm with a little investigation.

Building you own systems is nice, (I do) but certainly not an obligation.

And yeah, the Dell guy was a total ass for stating that 512 RD = 1024 DDR that's buusheet!

NicholasDWolfwood · Post by **NicholasDWolfwood** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 3:17 pm

He never said that.

He said "however what the guy in dell said was that if get a 512Rd rams it equals the same as 1gb Sdram."

Usually, SDRam means SDRAM, not DDR.

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 4:12 pm

Well Premiere by default likes to chew chew chew up the virtual memory, just opening it up makes it take about 450MB of VM. However, I really didn't notice THAT much of a improvement going from 256MB to 1280MB :\ Although multi-tasking is much nicer, if all you have open is Premiere then you should be okay especially with 512MB. Heck you could probably have Vdub or Photoshop open as well.

But usually I have Photoshop open with like 12 images in there, about 11 IE windows open to random pages, Premiere open with some random twiddlings and VDub running with a large AVS file in it :\ . It never really chokes or has to hit the swap file which is nice. I just which it was DDR though :\

~klinky

FurryCurry · Post by **FurryCurry** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 8:17 pm

NicholasDWolfwood wrote:He never said that.

He said "however what the guy in dell said was that if get a 512Rd rams it equals the same as 1gb Sdram."

Usually, SDRam means SDRAM, not DDR.

Ahem: DDR IS SDRAM. Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory.

Besides, if you check Dell's website here, you'll notice that the two models being asked about are DDR and RDRAM, respectively.

I don't think Dell routinely sells single data rate SDRAM systems anymore, FWIW.

Point is, the Dell sales guy was an idiot, or was lying to (possibly?) help them dump RDRAM systems in anticipation of Granite Bay models.

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Mon Feb 03, 2003 9:39 pm

Oh if it's DDR SDRAM then go for it, I could have sworn I heard that DELL was selling a shitty PC133 SDRAM infested P4 system

Go for the 4550 then :\ Most definitely...

~klinky