Retro gaming PC history lesson :) If you built gaming PCs around 2001-2002 you had to...

[Cooper Jake McKay]

Retro gaming PC history lesson If you built gaming PCs around 2001-2002 you had to use RDRAM for better performance, but it was super expensive. Before DDR came out which was way cheaper, RDRAM was wayyyy faster than SDRAM at the time. The gaming PC I built for my brother in 2002 was:

Pentium IV 2.53 GHz Northwood
Foxconn motherboard Intel 850E chipset (socket 478)
512 Mb PC1066 RDRAM
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128 mb

RDRAM was introduced by Rambus in 1999, (who also developed the memory used in the Nintendo N64, Sony Playstation2, and Playstation 3, among other things) When DDR SDRAM came out it was way cheaper and offered similar performance.

Compared to other contemporary standards, Rambus showed increase in latency, heat output, manufacturing complexity, and cost. Because of more complex interface circuitry and increased number of memory banks, RDRAM die size was larger than that of contemporary SDRAM chips, and results in a 10–20 percent price premium. By 2003, RDRAM was no longer supported by any personal computer.

 

[Cooper Jake McKay]

also I remember reading RDRAM had to have a heat spreader because of the heat output, back then DDR and SDRAM didn't always have a heat spreader.

 

[Tefen Ca]

Very Interesting! I never even knew about that type of RAM.

 

[Kevin Ng]

And lawsuits. Oh the lawsuits lol...

 

[Kevin Ng]

It was an interesting time. I skipped Intel this entire generation and went with AMD before going back to Intel when the Core Duos and Quads came out.

 

[Scott Heath]

I can't remember what kinds of high end RAM was available. Like SCSI, it was always out of my budget by like the price of my entire build.

 

[Thomas Curtis]

P4 for gaming? Not always - Athlon 4 life!!!

More seriously Rambus was also expensive and annoying as you had to buy matched pairs and both channels had to be filled e.g. if you wanted 128mb total ram you needed two 64mb sticks.

 

[Piotr Kruszyn]

Recently I got some P4 builr with RDRAM too! And those terminators.

 

[Geo Sukarno]

At the time, i was amazed to RDRAM after reading many review from magazines..
My opinion, machine using RDRAM is a must have for collection

 

[Brandon Mingo]

It actually wasn't much faster than DDR in regular home PC's. Workstation computers saw the biggest benefits. So glad this stuff died off as it was expensive. The terminators cost about $25 ea at the time! I have a few gigs of this stuff sitting in a bag at my shop.

This is the era AMD Barton was king.

 

[Johnny Chavarria]

Where technology and patent trolling come together

 

[Richard Prestlien]

My parents are still using a dell with a 478 p4 and rambus ram...


512mb to be exact... they refuse to upgrade in any wah... till something dies lol...(i have rambus in my ram box, but they wont let me put it in)

 

[Herb Miller]

I have still a board with a P4 chip that ran the rambus ram it was for sure faster that the normal sd ram

 

[Lee Fu Haw]

I gave this rams to Fathy Zin. Give him a try. it is a good performance ram for the old school pc build but the rams tend to be very hot.