wrote:It's now faster than her new computer. I reckon it was only "slow" before because she was limping along on the same XP install for YEARS.
Also XP with only 512MB of RAM, and probably a video card that didn't help much with youtube (a HD 48xx should help).
Yeah the RDRAM nonsense was a big mistake. I guess Intel thought it would be worthwhile after a few years of increasing volume reducing prices but that didn't really happen. P4 did need the extra bandwidth to perform acceptably. The alternative was maybe dual channel PC133? But that's not even close to the bandwidth of i850 RDRAM. DDR wasn't quite ready at the time.
wrote:Yeah the RDRAM nonsense was a big mistake. I guess Intel thought it would be worthwhile after a few years of increasing volume reducing prices but that didn't really happen. P4 did need the extra bandwidth to perform acceptably. The alternative was maybe dual channel PC133? But that's not even close to the bandwidth of i850 RDRAM. DDR wasn't quite ready at the time.
Maybe triple-channel? This might have done the trick, but I guess it would make the chipset a lot more expensive to make.
Are there any production chipsets that can actually do multi-channel SDRAM? Or even stuff that just never made it to market?
As far as P4 performance goes - I have an i845 S478 with PC-133 and it's no slouch (and it wasn't in 2001 either). I wouldn't say RDRAM is really "required" for Pentium 4 either - see this review for assorted benchmark examples: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-ddr,403-6.html
In a lot of cases the difference is nothing worth getting excited about. Reviewers love to make mountains out of mole-hills though, and RDRAM certainly had its share of hype around 2000-2001. Old myths die hard.
A ~20 % performance deficit is definitely significant.
Better to buy a beastly video card for games instead of the RDRAM though!
