Rambus? 1

[jesse83189]

my friend gave me this broken deminsion 8100 and it had no memory card... and i cant find the ram for it anywhere... something called rambus or something? and what processor can i switch the pentium 4 with to make it faster? thanks!

 

[paparazi]

ooooeeeer! Rambus is like rocking horse pooo! very hard to find nowadays....definately one for ebay I'm afraid.
CPU wise.. I reckon you will find you board can only support up to 533fsb processors so PRE Northwood. I think they went up to 3gig..another one for ebay..lol
Martin

On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep

 

[kmcferrin]

Rambus is not only hard to find, it's also devilishly expensive once you do find it. On top of that, you cannot have empty memory sockets on a Rambus board. They all have to be filled with memory modules OR you will have to put "dummy" modules in them to get the system to work. The memory modules are called RDRAM RIMMs, and the dummies are called CRIMMs. More details are here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAM

________________________________________
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[jesse83189]

so pretty much.... rambus was a messed up desingn from the beginning? lol

 

[Grenage]

Noo, it had a lot going for it!

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[paparazi]

I agree...it was the fastest ram by far at the time, the main issues were associated with licensing, price and the lack of adoption (I think this ram was only used in conjunction with the Intel 850 chipset) Absolutely nothing wrong with the performance.
Martin

On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep

 

[Sympology]

Raqmbus was very good, but was far to expensive and was non standard, so in the cut throat pc market, your cheap run of the mill memory won out (Betamax Vs VHS all again)

Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[kmcferrin]

The big problem with Rambus was that JEDEC came along with a design for DDR memory that offered most of the performance of Rambus at a much lower price point. On top of that, the Pentium 4 systems that Rambus memory was used in didn't push the memory to it's maximum potential. But at the time they had a contract with Intel whereby Intel was only allowed to produce Pentium 4 chipsets that support Rambus memory (no other memory standard) for a number of years. It was supposed to help Rambus lock up the market. What it actually did was add substantial cost to the price of Pentium 4 systems at a time when AMD was producing more competitive CPUs that used less expensive memory. It was ugly all around, unless you were AMD.

Of course, Rambus tried other ways of cornering the memory market too. They had a seat on JEDEC and intentionally submitted some of their patented technology to be incorporated into the DDR standard without telling anyone that they had patents pending on the tech. The thinking was that if Rambus memory won out, they'd make a fortune. If DDR won out, they'd sue everyone making it for patent infringement and make a fortune. It's been winding through the courts for awhile now, I'm not sure exactly how it turned out, but I know the FTC was going to come down pretty hard on them for their deceptive trade practices.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[Sympology]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/23/us_supreme_court_rejects_ftc_rambus_case/

Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[wahnula]

So jesse83189,

Your option is to purchase expensive used RAM and CPU (with no guarantee of success) to get a 10-year-old PC with 10-year old performance, which will now be subject to other failures, such as PSU, HDD & mainboard...OR...go get the bottom-of-the-line in modern tech. $49 mainboard, $49 CPU, $20 RAM, etc. which will clobber the old tech with a sledgehammer...and leave you with a decent upgrade path, rather than a dead end.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[jesse83189]

hmmm wow... so i guess rambus was good... "at the time" i also have a core 2 duo processor in my possesion... wat kind of mother board could i use that on?