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Old November 25th 04, 05:25 PM
Ben Myers
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Responses to your post below...

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 10:55:45 -0500, Eddie Crismond wrote:
SNIP
By Front Side Bus (FSB) I mean, that some P3's are designed to run on a
100Mhz FSB, while slightly laters P3's run on a 133Mhz FSB. I think this
Compaq has a P3 600/133. I know, Moore's Law has made the 33Mhz
difference irrelevant, since we have effective 400 and 800 Mhz FSBs now.

When I say bandwidth, I'm talking about memory bandwidth. What has more,
PC800 Rambus, or PC100/133 SDRAM? Does the latency of Rambus make its
memory bandwidth compared to PC133 SDRAM irrelavant? Is the FSB of this
processor a bottleneck? Can I get by with PC600 RDRAM if the BIOS
supports it? I might just get this thing to have basic usablity, and
worry about building a Sims platform later.

PC800 RAMBUS has greater bandwidth than PC133 SDRAM. But you're right that the
processor FSB is the bottleneck in the system with RAMBUS. If the motherboard
BIOS does not get upset, PC600 RAMBUS would probably do just fine. Certainly
the 820 chipset supports it, and scales down the bus clocking to work with
slower RAMBUS memory. If you happen to mix faster and slower RAMBUS in the same
system, all memory runs at the slower speed... Ben Myers