If I were, I wouldn't admit to it. 😉

Chewhacca wrote:

If I were, I wouldn't admit to it. 😉

Why not? It's cheap enough to build one now.

Sold the ram in mine years ago and threw the rest away.

Pity really as I liked that machine, but it was huge [ibm intellistation] and I needed the space back then - scsi drives, dual p3 933's, 1gb rdram, windows 2000 and a v5. The scsi drives used to sound like a jet taking off when you booted it up. Used to feel fast after the rather longwinded booting.

My family bought a Dell Dimension 8250 in 2003. We customized it with 512MB Rambus RAM because we, the (at the time) not computer-savvy people, were told that it was going to be the wave of the future and much better than anything else.

Found out how bad of a mistake that was when I went to upgrade it to 1GB a few years ago. Needless to say, it still has 512MB. I wasn't prepared to pay about $150 on a 5-year-old system just for another 512MB. I'm kinda thinking about it right now, though, because it looks like the prices have recently plummeted. Fleabay seems to have another 512 of PC1066 for about 20 bucks.

MrKsoft wrote:

My family bought a Dell Dimension 8250 in 2003. We customized it with 512MB Rambus RAM because we, the (at the time) not computer-savvy people, were told that it was going to be the wave of the future and much better than anything else.

Found out how bad of a mistake that was when I went to upgrade it to 1GB a few years ago. Needless to say, it still has 512MB. I wasn't prepared to pay about $150 on a 5-year-old system just for another 512MB. I'm kinda thinking about it right now, though, because it looks like the prices have recently plummeted. Fleabay seems to have another 512 of PC1066 for about 20 bucks.

Isn't RAMBUS PC800?

There's definitely PC1066 RDRAM. It has a 533mhz bus speed which would make sense since I have a P4 HT Northwood 3.06ghz that runs on a 533 bus.

Yup there is also the PC600 stuff.

Saw a compaq deskpro EN at my last job, that had a Pentium 3 933 with 256MB RDRAM. It was attached to a scanner. They thought it needed high memory bandwidth to work with images from the scanner.
Would have cost a bloody fortune back in the day and I reckon they wouldn't have noticed any difference from SDRAM. There's absolutely no point to RDRAM on a P3.

I wish
I'd kept the system , ended up going to auction with about 200 identical looking machines with standard SDRAM.

Read this for an interesting comparison of RAMBUS vs SDRAM

http://www.thg.ru/mainboard/20000302/print.html

Not only was RAMBUS insanely expensive, but the performance wasn't that much better that it would justify the price. The motherboards also cost more, so you would end up spending a ton of money for a barely measurable performance increase. For those needing the absolute limit in performance and for whom cost was no object, RAMBUS was the way to go but for everyone else SDRAM gave you only a few percent less performance for half the price, at least on socket 370 boards running PC800 RAM. Later boards with faster RDRAM may have shown bigger performance increases, but I don't have any links to any comparison tests.

I bought an Asus P3C-E a while back, and just recently order some RIMMs and a 700mhz processor for it. Plan on trying it for my Voodoo 2 SLI and for Windows 98. What makes this board interesting is that is has built in yamaha sound, with good dos compatibility reported and real OPL3.

If you look at this follow up to the review above, you can see how impressive even an overclocked 440BX chipset is compared to the RAMBUS systems.

http://www.thg.ru/mainboard/20000308/index.html

It even outperforms the i815 chipset which officially supports 133mhz fsb.

Just be wary, Rambus seems to come in 16 bit and 32 bit, which require different memory slots to use.
Alas, I don't have a RIMM rig.

P3 couldn't benefit from RAMBUS because P3's bus is matched to SDRAM. Any more memory bandwidth is useless aside from maybe some AGP transfers. And if you got a sys with PC600 it was slower than P133 SDRAM.

RAMBUS and P4 are a different story however. Amigaz has a sweet i850 rig but haven't seen him around for awhile.

Couldn't really afford it back in the early Pee4 days, but for the most part its fate was sealed once PC3200 (400 MHz) DDR went gold. Add dual-channel DDR400 into the mix and that really obliterated it.

But as far as RAMBUS systems go, I still have my PS2 if that still counts. 😉

How about Nintendo 64? 😁

swaaye wrote:

How about Nintendo 64? 😁

WIN. That little puppy kept me smiling all throughout grade school.

Too bad I sold mine after the 6th-gen consoles became popular.

I've owned 2 rambus systems. A HP Vectra VL600 with a 866mhz P3 that wasn't too impressive and a a Dell Workstation with a 2ghz P4/ 1gb RD 800-45. The Dell was pretty super- sold it off for a good price to a happy owner later.

Just to clear things up, RDRAM was available in a few speeds, 600, 700, 800 all 45 ns I think and then 800 ns 40 and 1066 ns45 which were meant for 533mhz bus P4s.

I want a supermicro PIIIDR3 motherboard. Dual slot 1... http://www.interloper.com/products/product-de … rch_str=bsearch

does running Linux on 2 different playstation2s count? 😜