Hi guys,
Anyone knows of a RDRAM desktop/workstation motherboard that can support 4GB RAM? (4x1Gb) The specs I say everywhere for the 850/850E boards say 2Gb max but I remember reading a long time ago that some worked just fine with 4Gb.
I have a 3.06HT sitting in a box and a 4650 AGP card, just wondering if such an old machine could be still usable for internet if using the right browser. 😁
Pentium 4 3,06GHz with HT isn't fast enough for modern internet.
Maybe it can play 360p/480p video from YouTube that isn't VP9, but still - RAM is usefull if want to run multiple things at once.
Problem in your case is that CPU simply isn't fast enough to that at this point (at least for your use case).
Oh, and it should be obvious, but I guess you missed it :
You need 64-bit CPU to get 4GB of RAM on standard versions of Windows.
Northwood isn't capable of that, so even on much newer chipset like 945G chipset, max. you will ever see in Windows is ~3,4GB.
The Intel 840 Pentium III chipset can handle 4GB of RAM, but the only P4-bus chipset that can is the 860 Colusa, which is designed for Xeon CPUs and - more relevantly - can only do 100MHz (400MT/s) FSB, whereas your CPU need 133MHz. The only chipset I'm aware of that could combine 4GB of RDRAM with that chipset is the SiS R658, which was incredibly rare back in the day (as it didn't appear until after DDR chipsets were commonplace) and more so now. The only motherboard I can think of with it is the Abit SI7-G.
And usable for internet? No way will a P4 3.06 single core be able to handle Web 2.0 content in an acceptable way. Maybe with an adblocker it might get doable, but both in oomph per core and number of cores this thing is too limited.
Guys, you missed the HD4650 AGP part, I'm not hoping that a 3.06HT could handle 720p but the HD4650 can do that fairly easily. However 4Gb RAM seems like an absolute minimum these days, 2Gb just won't cut it for comfortable usage.
Of course I didn't missed the 64-bit part, the question is about finding a board that would support RDRAM and 4 x1Gb sticks, the fact that only 3.4Gb will be available for OS use is knowd and accepted so to speak 😁
Most videos on youtube are using VP9 now and the HD4650 can't decode that. I believe pascal cards are the first nvidia cards to support that and the RX 400 series are the first AMD cards that do.
The "H.264ify" browser plugins still save the day if your PC can't handle VP9. It's a mystery as to how long H.264 encoding will be available though.
I've read some articles about VP9 and they have put a lot of effort into optimizing it for modern CPUs (even Atom) but yeah anything old and with a single core is probably going to do very poorly.
wrote:Most videos on youtube are using VP9 now and the HD4650 can't decode that. I believe pascal cards are the first nvidia cards to support that and the RX 400 series are the first AMD cards that do.
This seems somewhat relevant to this discussion.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
wrote:Guys, you missed the HD4650 AGP part, I'm not hoping that a 3.06HT could handle 720p but the HD4650 can do that fairly easily. However 4Gb RAM seems like an absolute minimum these days, 2Gb just won't cut it for comfortable usage.
The difference between 2GB and 4GB is noticeable, but not a show-stopper unless you want to have umpteen tabs open at the same time. But you're still going to be CPU-limited. I wasn't referring to video decoding as such, just purely the power needed to render your average modern website, even if none of it is moving content. It's just painful on a single-core CPU.
Of course I didn't missed the 64-bit part, the question is about finding a board that would support RDRAM and 4 x1Gb sticks, the fact that only 3.4Gb will be available for OS use is knowd and accepted so to speak 😁
Well, I did name one board that can do that - any luck looking for it or similar ones?
wrote:This seems somewhat relevant to this discussion.
Essentially it looks like anything similar to a 2.8Ghz HT P4 or better can do 480p and have some headroom left. So basically a 3.06HT with 2Gb RAM can still surf these days, which isn't too bad for a machine of this age. Also swaaye's suggestion about the H.264ify plugin is valuable 😀
wrote:Well, I did name one board that can do that - any luck looking for it or similar ones?
No and it doesn't look like there's a reasonable chance to find one. Guess I'll settle for a classic 850EMV2 and be done with it 😀
