In the design of modern computer systems, the speed gap between the CPUs and DRAMs has been a major concern. To relieve this problem at a low cost, several new DRAM architectures have been proposed. This study is aimed at evaluating quantitatively the impact of the new DRAM architectures (synchronous DRAM. dual-RAS synchronous DRAM, and enhanced DRAM) on the memory system performance. We developed a cache and memory simulator and performed various experiments using the traces generated from four benchmark programs. The simulation results show that the new DRAM architectures offer a better performance than a conventional one by 5~30% in a low cost system and their improvement in a high performance system is less than 1%. However, for resonable multiprogramming workoads, additional performance improvement of about 10~28% is expected in a high performance system while 1~3% in a low cost system.