Dell Precision 650 workstation (part II)

[garethace]

Plan on doing the same for the memory; getting the least amount and not use it. Then get 4*512 elsewhere.

 

I am actually not entirely sure, because the chipset is an old Pentium 3 840 workstation motherboard with two 1GHZ chips (slot types).

 

I know the board of that class can support registered memory or not. Considering the price i paid for the modules, i would say yes, registered. The nice part about the OR840 platform too, was it is dual channel 4 slot memory system. ALtogether as stable a machine, as i have ever built. The Pentium 3s weren't very hot either you see. But i went on towards AMD athlons after that - Intel was just getting far too expensive to buy and upgrade i thought.

 

I used a couple of very nice registered PC 133 SDRAM modules in a KT 133A once - i taught i wouldn't work but it did, the performance increase was actually quite good. I got two 256MB modules when a Dell server was upgraded to 1GB - so i was lucky to get them - i wish i had never given them away though - would do nicely in a rendering farm situation now!

 

You see, i invested heavily in rambus pc 800, and then the specs of memory changed so dramatically, i decided to purchase all value memory ever since - and just replace the dimms regularly, for bigger ones. I find it hard to fills all memory slots with value memory though - i think, that is where higher grade registered/ecc memory does come into the equation.

 

In alot of boards, filling the 4 slots needs registered, but with only two full, you normally do get away with unbuffered.

 

It is alot like Hard drives really, isn't it? I mean for alot of applications adding more integrated cache (8-16mbs) will provide better performance increase than spindle speed/more bandwidth etc.

 

But if your chipset does support say 400mhz DDR sdram with a canterwood chipset say, and a new Prescott P4 chip do you really need registered memory? It would be interesting to benchmark the performance actually.

 

The Athlon MP platform is totally for registered memory as a platform, but then again - the Athlon MP is usually employed now as a good database server platform than a workstation.

[Mistyk]

Thanks for your reply garethace.

[garethace]

No problem, hope i was of some help! You might find this of interest:

 

Some good benchmarking done here:

 

Memory Timings Analysis

 

http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/memory/memory_timings/

 

[ May 19, 2003, 09:59 AM: Message edited by: garethace ]