Dell RDRAM

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I have a friends Dell PC which I was going to upgrade the RAM on as it only has 128MB and he is running XP Pro. However, after I managed to get the stupid case off I realised the RAM is strange, it is Rambus sticks with two small slots near the centre. Turns out that when this PC was on the market (about three years ago) they used RDRAM which is about seven times more expensive per MB than your usual DIMMs etc. The really funny thing is that RDRAM is not really any faster than conventional RAM.

So, I can't upgrade it as the RAM would be rediculously expensive.

Has anyone else come across this?

Pete

 

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yeah all of our duel processor xeon workstations at work (Compaq Evo W6000 workstations) of the era used RDRAM, in actual fact it was faster than the ddr memory tech at the time, albiet still prohibitavly expensive, and due to the deal with intel it was use that, or use standard SDRAM SIMMS

DDR Ram only came to fruitation on intel chipsets a few years ago, a good year behind its AMD counterparts, ofcourse by this time DDRs market saturation had caused it to improve to be on par with RDRAM RIMMS, although a shortlived sucessor running at 1066mhz failed to really make a dent

Intel obviously eventually realised thier mistake, and DDR is now the defacto, being somewhat replaced recently by DDR2, which is in the same boat at the moment, due to its relativly new tech, the timings on it are hiigh enough to increase latancy to the point that the increased bandwidth means nothing as the latency counters it to that of DDR speeds, expect this to change as the tech matures

RDRAM is unfortunatly still sort of expensive, but it may be worth the upgrade rather than obsoleting the whole machine, after a brief search i found a 256mb stick for 60 quid, ofcourse you could get 1gb of budget ddr for that price, but thats not the point, its not a majorly prohibative cost for the benefit you would gain over 128mb

however as far as i recall RIMMS required pairing? do you have two 64mb sticks? or am i wrong?

 

Thanks for the info Phoenix, you know stuff

Yes there are 2 x 64 meg chips and they have metal heat syncs so they must get relatively hot too!

I will look around but not too hard as this job is a freeby

Pete