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

[William Munson]

Yeechang Lee wrote:
> 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?
>
>   
At best you will see a 20% improvement but most likely your problem is 
disk access and not memory speed so the answer is probably no.