Broken away from the main stream.

[Taggert_LOA]

I have successfully completed my ongoing build of my new pc. I have selected after careful consideration (and price) to step down from RDRAM technology ( which is still the best in my opinion) and join the Ranks of DDR.
For My motherboard i have chosen the MSI 865PE NEO2-P, 3 256MB pc2700 DDR RAM, and a P4 2.6 GHZ CPU. Coolermaster jetmaster 4 cpu cooler and i am using my old but beefed Geforce 3 ti200 with a iceberq gpu fan. i have to say i was quite suprised with the amount of detail provided by the manual on the layout of the motherboard. i did have some difficulties, with hooking up the powerswitch cable to the board but after studying the manual i got that all figured out.
All in all i have to say i am quite satisified with my new rig and it looks awesome in my new Electric Blue Gaurdian Case By NZXT.

Now let's Breakdown the costs.

MotherBoard 149.99 (Compusa)
Memory (3) 54.99 (Compusa) 20.00 mail in rebate for each.
JetMaster 4 24.99 (CoolerGuys)
Case 79.99 (CoolerGuys)
CPU 249.99 (compusa)

Grand total 669.96

i know alot of the componets i could have shopped for a better price, but it was never about price, and it was available now, which is what mattered most. I am happy with what i got and any feed back you can give would be greatly appreciated. I am in Search of a new card so any suggestions would help. 250.00 or less.

 

[logisticprism]

WTF...i just built my cousin a new computer... 3.0 ghz p4 with 1 meg l2 cache and 800 mhz fsb for 200 dollars. and 150 for a freaking motherboard, kinda expensive. i got a geforce fx5200 for him for 50 bucks. well i guess if price didn't matter then it's ok, but still you could have saved a lot and spent more on something like a nice 6800 GT. as for a graphics card, wait a little bit for prices to come down on either the 5950 or the 9800 xt and you can probably get one for around 250 if you search for a good enough price in about a month.

also just curious, do you have any justification for preferring rd ram over ddr, or are you upset that intel has lost the ram battle and converted?

 

[Taggert_LOA]

So just a few weeks away from when Rambus RDRAM memory looks set to die for the PC platform, it's somewhat ironical and, perhaps, unjust that reviews from three hardware web sites have concluded that the 850E performs a heck of a sight better than Intel's new DDR based Granite Bay (E7205) chipset.

Mind you, information posted here at the INQUIRER shows that Granite Bay only has a half life of around six weeks itself, before Intel swerves again with its upcoming Canterwood chipset.

A review at Ace's Hardware said that Granite Bay needs fast DDR 333 running at DDR 266 2-2-2 just to keep up with the i850e chipset, while it's more expensive too. Plus, although dual DDR 266 is faster by around 15 per cent at reading long datastreams, Rambus are up to 60% more efficient at handling writes and interspersed reads and writes. So, the Rambus chipset offers more bandwidth.

Michael, at Lost Circuits, gives Granite Bay a gentle sort of rough ride too. If HT (hyperthreading) is enabled, he reckons you need 2GB of system memory to note lose performance.

And venerable InfoWorld agrees with this assessment too. In this review, it claims systems using Rambus RDRAM perform better on hyperthreading than that old new DDR SDRAM stuff.

It says: "We also found that Hyper-Threading gains are greater when using Rambus DRAM than when using DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM."

Of course, Intel itself has the whole world+dog now scrabbling around after it introduced cunning plans for fast DDR 400 which, because of its market position, looks set to be the "standard" this coming year.

So where is Rambus right now? The firm is waiting for courts of appeals to release their verdicts, and a lot hangs on those decisions. Those verdicts are likely in weeks, or perhaps months.

The Federal Trade Commission is also investigating Rambus but that will take a while before it's decided, while, somewhat ironically, the Department of Justice (DoJ) is investigating Micron.

It turns out – judging from the reviews above, that Rambus and Intel were both right about the technological advantages of RMBS RDRAM. But that was never really the point, was it?

The rest of the industry was determined it shouldn't have to pay these pesky royalties and while Intel continued bolstering Rambus, inside the corporation – we know on very good authority, wiser counsels were hearing what the vendors and other partners were muttering, and were attempting to get top management to stop being so "pig headed" about persisting in support for RDRAM. Market realities appear to have prevailed inside Intel.

One source inside the corp told us that if it had listened a little bit earlier, and applied the right persuasive techniques, by now Rambus RDRAM would have been the pervasive PC standard.

As Dataquest senior semiconductor analyst Andrew Norwood never tires of saying: "Nothing moves the memory market like FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt)"...

 

[logisticprism]

interesting...i'll have to look into that

 

[logisticprism]

http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20020501/ddr400vsrambus-10.html

also here: http://forums.relicnews.com/archive/index.php/t-23629

hmmm...?

 

[Maveric169]

Just an FYI for the future and for others building comps, CompUSA is one of the most expensive places to buy components from. In the future check out newegg.com and see if you can get it there first. They are usually much cheaper.

 

[logisticprism]

yeah i agree, comp usa is extremely expensive. newegg has better prices, not the best, but better, and good reliability with fast shipping.

 

[Taggert_LOA]

i know that, but i don't do the shipping thing anymore. if i have a problem , i don't have to worry about rma, i can bring it in and get it replaced right then and there. that means more to me than saving a few bucks.