Rdram ??

[RhinoZ]

Hi Ya Folks,
A friend of mine ( who has money coming out of his ears ), wants to get a new computer. A top of the line Intel or AMD. Anyways he asked me about RDRAM. I know little about it.
Anybody here uses it? Like it? Wish they had it if money was no object?

Thanks

[M|x]

i heard that you can get rd ram with speed up to 1000mhz. and it is, offcourse, faster than ddr ram. but you probably need an expencive motherboard.

intel tried to make rd ram big for a while ago, but it was too expensive.
and please, shoot me if im wrong

[ayoub_ibrahim]

get him a canterwood(i875) motherboard & some pc3700 ddr!

[dZeus]

Originally posted by ayoub_ibrahim
get him a canterwood(i875) motherboard & some pc3700 ddr!

PC3700????

Never heard of any faster jedec spec than PC3200

[M|x]

well, its a norwegian site, but see for your self
click

PC3700 (466MHz FSB)

[dZeus]

I was being a smart-ass...

what I mean is that 'PCxxxx' means that the DIMM is compliant with the Jedec specs for 'PCxxxx'. So stuff that there's no Jedec spec for can't be called 'PCxxxx'. The only problem is that there are no laws to prevent rogue manufacturers from putting random 'PCxxxx' stuff on their DIMMs (other than perhaps laws to forbid misleading the customer?).

[mutz]

Hi Rhino. I've got RDRAM (see sig.) It's the fastest and the best for Pentium 4s, and while this rig of mine is hard to beat in many respects, it is expensive. And since the Rambus route is expensive, among other things, it's losing popularity. I don't know how it will eventually turn out with Rambus, but they are definitely off the main stream.

...but I'm extremely happy with this machine. It's been a long time since I've had a machine this fast, stable and flexible.

[Marshmallowman]

I usualy recomend ddr/athlon kind of stuff, but that just value for money talking

The latest dual ddr boards pretty MATCH performance of the fastest RDRAM board...mainly becasue there is no 800 fsb rdram boards(is there?)
and I think you can actually get 1200 rdram now as well...but the choice of boards has really dried up.

I would say a dual channel ddr would be the go either intel or athlon

When you say money is no object do you mean it....dual Xeon?, dual opteron

A dual operon gives you 4 effective ddr channels....but you'll have to find a PCI-X video card.

Whats is going to use it for, solitaire?

[az]

Buy a i875 or i865 mainboard for the p4, get a fast p4 with hyperthreading, donate the money you saved on rdram (which is not quite as fast as dual channel DDR on a i875, took long enough) to some worthy cause.

AZ

[Guru]

I would go with HyperX DDR 434MHz (PC3500) 2-3-3-7-1 (CAS Latency 2!)

http://www.kingston.com/hyperx/default.asp

[borat]

to put a few myths to bed:
ill try to dredge out a bit of RDRAM history with the P4, my memory is sketchy but i think it goes like this. When the P4 came out it ran on a 400Mhz bus and there was no way and kind of SDram could fulfill its bandwidth requirements back then, so it launched with RDram as the performace platform. the downside to the memory was that it was dual channel so you had to install the memory in pairs which everyone complained about (although now people dont seem to mind with dual DDR) when running 800Mhz RDram this gave a bandwidth of 3.2 gig/sec while PC2100 only gave 2.1 gig/sec a clear advantage,also samsung rimms were very good overclockers so many people got well over 1000Mhz out of them when overclocking their P4 FSB. moving on a bit to recent times about a year ago 1066Mhz RDram was introduced with the 533FSB pentium 4, this gave 4.2gig/sec memory banwidth and at the time was once again the performance king, again samsung rimms were very overclocable helping push performance on as they used highewr spec chips than thei official ratings suggested. since this point intel has moved away from RDram to dual channel DDR and the Granite bay chipset brought dual pc2100 and pc2700 spec to the P4 platform giving 4.2 and 5.4gig/sec respectively but you have to run the memory asynch with the fsb for the latter unless you overclock. the latest intel P4 boards are the current high end choice and run with dual channel DDR up to PC3200 giving 6.4gig/sec memory bandwidth to fill the new 800mhz P4's busses with. higher spec PC3700 can give 7.4gig/sec when you overclock, in short the 865 and 875 chipsets are the nes to go for, SIS has a quad channel RDram chipset planned for release sometime this year giving 8.4gig/sec with 1066Mhz RDram or over 9gig/sec with 1200Mhz RDram, although its questionable whether this will ever get to market as you have to install ram in modules of 4 at a time. also unless you seriously overclock your P4 with 800Mhz FSB you will never need this sort of memory bandwidth on it. if i were buying high end today id get an intel 875 chipset with PC3700 dual channel, RDram is inferior at present and intel is dropping it if all goes to plan in the future.

[rylan]

Rambus seems to be slowlg going away. I'd never buy the stuff for a PC. Its all about the hype, saying that it runs at 800MHz and crap, but its a serialized interface with a narrow buswidth, so it has to run at crazy clock speed to be able to keep the bandwidth up. The biggest tghing that rticks me off about rambus (besides the rambus thieving lawyers) is that the stuff is loading dependant, which means as you add more the latency increases due to increase loading on the serial lines. Rambus excels at sequencial access for stuff like streaming video, but takes a hit at random.
I'd much rather go for an AMD system with a 400MHz dual channel DDR motherboard.

[RhinoZ]

Hey Marshmallowman,
You hit the nail on the head, he will probably use it just for solitaire.
He's kind of a messed up guy, that once someone tells him something new, or sells him on a new thing, he's got to have it. He travels to the US alot between his companies and some geek down there was bragging about how his Intel 2G rig can beat a 3G intel rig ( or anything else for that matter ) because he has RDRAM. So he's on a rampage to get a system like it.
I just wanted some real life info from the people here.

Hey Mutz,
That's a cool system with some nice toys. What do you mostly use your computer for?

Thanks Borat for the History.

Thanks Folks

[knirfie]

Originally posted by Guru
I would go with HyperX DDR 434MHz (PC3500) 2-3-3-7-1 (CAS Latency 2!)

http://www.kingston.com/hyperx/default.asp

yup, that's what i was gonna recommend too, it's fast, and cheaper then the competition, +liftime warrenty.

I know what i'm getting for my new system (well, at least what memory i'm gonna get).

[Paddy]

That Kingston RAM seems cheap