Reply 20 of 31, by dionb
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DenizOezmen wrote on 2020-07-05, 09:17:dionb wrote on 2020-07-05, 09:03:Of course Asus did make one i8xx board that has it all: the Asus P3C-E, with native 133MHz FSB, performance on par with i440BX and an ISA slot too. But rare as hen's teeth as RDRAM, which these days is no more expensive than SDRAM, but 20 years back cost far, far more. I have one, but it's dead :'(
But is still only goes up to 1 GB of RAM because of the i820, doesn't it?
Unless you can get it stable on 3 RIMMs (which, let's face it, isn't possible), no.
Edit: Maybe to clarify this a bit: When I was talking about a "sweet spot", this was purely from a personal standpoint. Obviously, there is no such thing as the perfect mainboard, and everyone has to settle for their own compromise. Having worked with virtual machines early on made chipsets with a high RAM limit attractive. RDRAM was prohibitively expensive, and pairing an i820 with an MTH to use affordable SDRAM meant basically losing the performance gain over earlier Intel chipsets or those of competitors. (And in any case, the RAM limitation stayed in place.)
Not competely sure what the MTH does in terms of limits. I have a working i820 board (P3C-D) and an MTH-on-a-stick which is rumoured to take 512MB DIMMs. The mind boggles. Maybe I'll give it a try one day. Still, no doubt that the MTH was a monstrosity, combining the high latencies of RDRAM with the relatively low bandwidth of SDRAM, and adding a bit of instability for good measure.
In the end, the i8xx chipsets never made much sense me (regarding my intended usage).
What on earth were you doing back then that needed >1GB of RAM? Even with virtualization, that's pretty heavy.