SDRAM compatibility with P4?

My com specs r reasonably on the high end... with:

Intel Penium 4 2.4 GHz HT
MSI GeForce FX 5600 Ultra with 256mb of local video memory
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe
Maxtor 80 gig serial-ATA hard drive
1 Gig of SD-RAM

howerever, when i ran the 3DBenchmark 2003 program, i get framerates which are below average. I even get choppy framerates when playing nbalive 2004, unreal tournament and farcry. I use screen resolutions of 1024x768 for the games (sometimes had to go down to 800x600) and my desktop resolution is currently at 1600x1200 pixels. Is the slow framerate during games due to the type of ram i have? I even downloaded the latest nvidia drivers... still, framerate for games which i should be playing at optimum performance remain disappointing to me...

Your ram could be slowing you down some, but i'd say more likely its your video card. Its not exactly cutting edge hardware, and farcry and UT are pretty demanding games (I have an overclocked radeon 9800 pro, and I still get a bit laggy if i put the settings all the way up on farcry). What do you mean by "below average" for 3dmark? If you're comparing to the same video card, I'd say your ram is the next place I'd look to improve (who gets sdram now anyway? Its more expensive than ddr now).

i read elsewhere that sdram might be the cause of the bottleneck for the system... since it retricts p4s proccessability potential, and requires a lot of bandwidth to keep up... true?.... i thought ddr ram was always more expensive compared to sdram....

The ram is probably a bottleneck, but for most games at higher resolutions, its the video card that really lets things play smoothly. SD ram is about the same to a tiny bit more expensive than DDR now, since everything uses DDR these days, and there is little SD ram available anymore, which has driven up the price.

i understand if the game lags at very high resolutions.. but at 800x600 and at 1028x768? the games still get a little choppy.. but counterstrike works very pretty well under 1028x768.... DDR ram would definitely boost things by tenfolds rite?

Increase performance, yes. Increase 10x, not likely. But you would definitely see some benefit from ddr.