[mythtv-users] Will moving to DDR-400 memory from DDR-333 improve performance?

[Yeechang Lee]

I currently have 1.5GB of DDR-333 memory in my 3.0GHz,
Hyperthreading-enabled, Pentium 4-based, dedicated frontend/backend
with recordings on a NAS. I don't use XvMC to get 1080p output from a
Nvidia 6200TC card. I record and watch HD streams almost
exclusively. I've done my best to not run non-essential daemons.

Despite the processor's fairly-recent vintage, I unsurprisingly find
that when I push the system's limits--by, say, playing back a HD
recording while recording from more than one of the three HD stream
sources the system possesses--I get occasional skips in the playback
with the dreaded "NVP: prebuffering" messages. When this happens, I
can see the mythfrontend process momentarily hit 99.9% of the
processor (or, more accurately, one half of the processor) in top
(refreshing every 0.5 seconds). Also, regardless of whether anything
is recording, ever since I started running a single mythtranscode
process in the background 24/7, I've been unable to reliably use the
beautiful Bob deinterlacing with HD programs, so I use Linear or
Kernel instead.

My Intel 915G-chipset motherboard is capable of running either DDR-333
or DDR-400 memory. Would switching to the latter make a meaningful
difference in my system's overall performance in these situations?

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US