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rambus upgrade ???

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ocing newbie

Member
Joined
Jul 5, 2005
Location
Ann Arbor, MI
my friend has an old system with an early p4 and an asus mobo with 2x265mb of 32bit rambus memory. I'm about to give him an ati 9700 agp card to play cs:s and bf2 with and want to upgrade the memory to a 1gb. Does anyone want to figure out how I can do this?
 
RAMBUS is a a tough one to find a good price on for the larger amounts. The card is not going to be an issue.

When you look for the RIMM make sure about the latencies. Some boards want 40ns some want wahtever fits. Also make sure the board supports that much RIMM. Most RIMM you find on eBay is 45ns. If the board demands 40ns RIMM keep a close eye when you are looking for it. Most the time it will be at the end and look like -40 or -45.

Make sure it is a set, or you get a CRIMM. I think that is what it is called. It cheats the RAM into thinking there is a stick in a slot and you can get one stick instead of using a set. It does give a pretty good hit on performance though.
 
It would be helpful if you gave some information about what the current RIMM is running at. Is it 40ns or 45ns? What model board and/or the max it supports. The older P4's were kind of picky. Aslo I assume you are using XP? If your running ME or 98 it will not address more than 512 correctly.
 
Well I think the ram is probably pc1066. I know that the cpu is clocked at 2.4 and there might have been a 533 in the mobo model name. Yeah it's running XP.
 
I did not find any RIMM in that amount on eBay. What I did find was over $500. RIMM is pricey at lower amounts. As you go higher it is cheaper to just buy another computer. Unless there is no choice.
 
Rimm is pretty sweet stuff. The price makes it sour. If it was cheaper most systems would be using it. The price drove consumers away.
 
You said it was 1066 I can see in the link it is PC800 45ns. If that setup takes Pc800 45ns your in luck since that is easy to get and not badly priced for RIMM.

You need to be sure of the speeds.
 
I assume this is the board:

Key Features of the ASUS P4T533:

Supports socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 processors up to 2.4GHz and beyond
Intel 850E chipset
533/400 MHz front-side-bus and memory bus for up to 4.2GB/s peak bandwidth
Two 32-bit RIMM Sockets support max. 2GB RIMM3200 or RIMM4200 ECC/non-ECC RAMBUS memory
Optional C-Media 8738-MX 6-channel PCI Audio controller
Five PCI slots, four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 1.1 ports, two DMA 100/66/33 interface, one AGP 4X slot.
ATX form-factor
 
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Id be leary of those modules. Although they are Samsung originals you will prolly have to pay customs taxes seeing as how they are shipping from the UK.

Also, thats nearly $200 less than new kits go for in the retail sector. My price on a new kit of 40ns Sammsung non-ECC is $479.

For that much you could pick up a cheap board that uses DDR, memory and maybe even a new proc.
 
Enablingwolf said:
I assume this is the board:

Key Features of the ASUS P4T533:

Supports socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 processors up to 2.4GHz and beyond
Intel 850E chipset
533/400 MHz front-side-bus and memory bus for up to 4.2GB/s peak bandwidth
Two 32-bit RIMM Sockets support max. 2GB RIMM3200 or RIMM4200 ECC/non-ECC RAMBUS memory
Optional C-Media 8738-MX 6-channel PCI Audio controller
Five PCI slots, four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 1.1 ports, two DMA 100/66/33 interface, one AGP 4X slot.
ATX form-factor
Yeah that's deffinately the board he has. What speed 40 or 45 does that use?
 
It is not 40 or 45. It takes RIMM3200 or RIMM4200 ECC/non-ECC RAMBUS memory.

Before I did not know. Once you told me of the model (or was vague enough for me to hunt down to something to make a guess).

You need to look for what the board supports. There is alot of diffent types of RIMM. In your case RIMM3200 if performance is not a huge issue, or waht should be used RIMM4200. If you buy a set of PC800 of any speed, your going to be wasting money.

It is not going to be cheap to find a set that works for that in the amounts you want. You will be better off and cheaper to just scrap the MOBO/CPU/RAM. Look to something newer. Then the thought of 1GB of RAM is possible under 500 bux.


If you keep the setup, your looking at a very pricey RAM upgrade path.
 
RIMM3200 is PC-800, only 232 pin rather than 184 pin. Even more rare as I believe only Samsung makes them any longer.

You more than likely would not be able to find them except maybe on ebay. The company I work for sells memory and I know that there are four or five PC800 and a few PC1066 232 pin modules in stock. Been sitting there for years.
 
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