gdjacobs wrote:

The problem with all Intel systems prior to P4 was that the FSB paced performance. I'd be amazed if RDRAM was faster, as additional bandwidth could not be directly utilized by the CPU and RDRAM had additional latency cost over more traditional technologies.

There wasn't much of a benefit of using the 820 at all and it often lost to the 815 in benchmarks, the 840 on the other hand is dual channel and really nice for p3 smp builds.

I've got some OEM Pentium4/RDRAM system sitting in my basement. I haven't looked at it in awhile. When I first acquired it, I cracked it open (it's one of those cases that opens like a suitcase) and looked around to see what it was made of. So I know there is RDRAM but beyond that I haven't researched. I'm thinking it's an HP?

clueless1 wrote:

I've got some OEM Pentium4/RDRAM system sitting in my basement. I haven't looked at it in awhile. When I first acquired it, I cracked it open (it's one of those cases that opens like a suitcase) and looked around to see what it was made of. So I know there is RDRAM but beyond that I haven't researched. I'm thinking it's an HP?

That sounds like a Dell clam shell, check for bad caps on the board and the psu in those machines is a time bomb.

nforce4max wrote:

There wasn't much of a benefit of using the 820 at all and it often lost to the 815 in benchmarks, the 840 on the other hand is dual channel and really nice for p3 smp builds.

The 840 suffered from the exact same problem that the 820 did. It's paced by the FSB which is shared on P3 SMP systems. K7 SMP had a point to point bus between each CPU and the north bridge, so it could have benefited from dual channel DDR.