XDR is unbelievably fast and with low latency, but that might not be the bottle neck here. Much of the latency problem comes from the northbridge. What chipset does your computer use? What chipset does your friend's Dell use? In general, speeding up the main memory at the low end of the cache hierarchy is the least effective and most expensive way of improving performance. It is like putting a weight on the long end of a lever and trying to move it with the short end.

The specs that I would worry about are those of the chipset on the mobo and the CPU. Any shortcomings there will be very noticeable. By comparison, selecting good memory should be easy as long as you don't try for the cheapest possible.

There is not much posting about hardware on this board. You might want to ask for advice over on The DC Zone ( http://forum.thedczone.com/ ) in the Hardware section.

Lawrence