The ridiculous 820 chipset and P3 debacle was just mind boggling. The PIII with a 133 MHz FSB was perfectly matched with PC133 SDRAM. RDRAM couldn't gain you anything because the FSB was saturated already.

840 with dual processors makes more sense and obviously so does 850 with P4's bus that has ~2x the P3's bandwidth.

I've read many times that RDRAM is worse on latency than other memory types. And since CPUs are very sensitive to latency (reason for caches), this is not ideal. RDRAM probably makes more sense for graphics because GPUs aren't as sensitive to latency.

Good to know!

Actually, RDRAM isn't inherently any worse than SDRAM as far as latency... in some scenarios it's actually better. I think the reputation came from, one, people completely misunderstanding the "45ns" rating on the modules, and two, the epic suckitude of the i820 chipset.

Here's a pretty good article explaining it in depth, though it kinda glosses over the details of component latency, better explained here. (Keep in mind with that second article, though, the numbers are assuming a 100mhz fsb P4... they change a bit for a 133fsb, coming out pretty close to even between SDRAM and RDRAM.)

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Actually, RDRAM isn't inherently any worse than SDRAM as far as latency... in some scenarios it's actually better. I think the reputation came from, one, people completely misunderstanding the "45ns" rating on the modules, and two, the epic suckitude of the i820 chipset.

Don't forget the price tag it had 😉

Well I made a bit of an breakthrough today. Finally figured out how to use that slot 1 adapter. I had 2, one was pretty useless with no jumpers and nothing on it.

But the other one had a lot of jumpers. It's a MSI jumper and although not compatible with tualatin, it does take all the coppermines. What I didn't know initially was that you need to overclock your BX440 mainboard to get the full speed out of these 133 FSB cpus.

There is also another setting 112 MHz or something. Well 133 worked just fine. No issues so far. So it ran my 1 GHz coppermine at full speed and without a hitch.

Earlier I had a lot of crashes in Wing Commander, but at one point I could read the error message and it had emm386 written all over the screen. So I booted with only himem.sys and the game ran just fine. I guess there is a issue with the emm386 from FreeDos. I will try Dos 6.22 at another point in time.

Speedwise at FSB 133 / 1 GHz / 133 SDRAM Wing Commander runs at a perfect speed. Wing Commander is a bit all over the place speed wise. When nothing is going on its a bit to fast and when there are many ships its a bit to slow. But on average it's perfect.

So my next step is to find a sloket that can handle tualatin cpus and see how fast I can take this machine 😁

PS: Man Wing Commander is so much fun. I played through the first 4 or 5 missions and it's way past bed time 😮

I can't wait to replay all these classics with Roland Sound. At last!