P3 Tualatin RAM

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Feb 5, 2005
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Does anyone know of any chipsets for the P3 Tualatin that allow you to use RDRAM? Does the processor suffer a performance hit from using the slower SDRAM (I haven't seen any RDRAM chipsets yet for the Tualatin)?
 
RDRAM is total overkill, and very expensive overkill. if you can, just find a board that accepts DDR and overclock it :D
 
I have only seen one board that used RDRAM for a P3 and it was a Dell Optiplex several years ago. It's not worth the extra cost to go RDAM anyways.

Novensu
 
I thought RDRAM was pretty cool. I mean, its cost and the requirement of dual channel sucks, but its bandwidth was way ahead of its time.
 
even DDR is not much use for it because the FSB on that is only 133. so that would cause a bottleneck. if you have a p3 board you can get an adapter for $40 or so that lets it take tualatin. i put one in an original shuttle sv24 and it worked fine.
 
DeFex said:
even DDR is not much use for it because the FSB on that is only 133. so that would cause a bottleneck. if you have a p3 board you can get an adapter for $40 or so that lets it take tualatin. i put one in an original shuttle sv24 and it worked fine.

Wouldnt that DDR ram give better headroom with overclocking the P3?
 
If I remember correctly, the bandwidth that the CPU has to the norhtbridge is the limitation. There were DDR mobo's. I've even played with one that took both SDRAM and DDR. The DDR didn't show any real performance increase.

I have my Tualatin in a mobo w/ a 815 chipset and 512 mbs of pc133 SDRAM. The limitation I've hit is the 512mb limit, not the bandwidth.

-dB
 
the only intel desktop chipset that would accept RDRAM and an s370 proc was i840, I think.

there's no i840 step that will recognize a tualatin core or all the pin reassignments. you need a special stepping of the i815 (EP), or the various tualatin-aware VIA chipsets (694T?) to run tualatin procs. maybe a socket adapter would work, but there's no damn sense in it. i840 is slow.
 
DeFex said:
even DDR is not much use for it because the FSB on that is only 133. so that would cause a bottleneck. if you have a p3 board you can get an adapter for $40 or so that lets it take tualatin. i put one in an original shuttle sv24 and it worked fine.
yeah, but its much easier to get my tuallies to 166bus using ddr than it is sdram. otherwise, i wouldve gotten an sdram board.
 
DDR didn't show much of a performance increase on PIII era CPUs. Even most AMD K7 CPUs didn't show much of a benefit of having DDR.

The only PIII chipsets that supported DDR were some via chipsets (and all via chipsets at that time had HORRIBLE memory bandwidth). I know abit and asus made boards but I doubt you'll be able to find any new ones any more. Look around the FS forums, maybe you can find something. But I really reccomend just looking for a nice SDRAM mobo like the Abit ST6.

/edit: I just happened across an ST6 here:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=866638
 
BigBadBiologist said:
DDR didn't show much of a performance increase on PIII era CPUs. Even most AMD K7 CPUs didn't show much of a benefit of having DDR.

The only PIII chipsets that supported DDR were some via chipsets (and all via chipsets at that time had HORRIBLE memory bandwidth). I know abit and asus made boards but I doubt you'll be able to find any new ones any more. Look around the FS forums, maybe you can find something. But I really reccomend just looking for a nice SDRAM mobo like the Abit ST6.
Seconded. No damn sense in getting a DDR board for a Tualatin processor. Scavenge cheap PC133 from anywhere and build your box.

The only limitation to using the i815EP chipset for this is that it supports a max of 512MB memory. If you want more, you're stuck with the 694T, and as BigBadBiologist said, VIA chipsets of that era weren't known for memory bandwidth. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
 
even DDR is not much use for it because the FSB on that is only 133. so that would cause a bottleneck. if you have a p3 board you can get an adapter for $40 or so that lets it take tualatin. i put one in an original shuttle sv24 and it worked fine.

You wouldn't happen to have any of the SV24 parts or that adapter anymore, would you?
 
DAMN! lol....

I got excited for a second when I thought someone was talking about a Tualatin only to be disappointed.
 
Holy shit necro. I thought all this stuff was lost in purge number 3. Damn, thought someone was building a retro kit.

Hilarious reading all the old sigs from people that never updated.
 
Wow, I was wondering if someone had some of that sweet PC-150 memory for their P3. Just a thread necro...sadface
 
I like 440BX boards for Tualatin because od native ISA support which makes these perfect platform for DOS. Disabling caches bring performance to 286/386 levels.
These only typically support 384MB, not sure if there are any modded BIOSes for any boards. Chipset should apparently support more.
To me this limitation does not matter because as far as I am concerned for 98/XP there are far better platforms and 98 realistically not much games which do need 98 instead eg XP require more memory.

For XP the best platform would be something like Ivy/Sandy Bridge and these easily support 4GB memory and even more and Windows 10 to make for normal usable PC for today.
 
I may still have some RDRAMM around here. I in fact did have a tualitin wiht RDRAM back in the day. THe board was a C302 or something along those lines No it was
ASUS TUSL2-CU that was it
 
Holy shit necro. I thought all this stuff was lost in purge number 3. Damn, thought someone was building a retro kit.

Hilarious reading all the old sigs from people that never updated.
Kinda hard to update if you've left and never returned.

...or just lost an old account. (I wasn't able to recover my original '01 account when building my next system 4 years later, I suspect it was tied to a .edu address I no longer had access to.)
 
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Kinda hard to update if you've left and never returned.

...or just lost an old account. (I wasn't able to recover my original '01 account when building my next system 4 years later, I suspect it was tied to a .edu address I no longer had access to.)
if you email [email protected] and tell him the username and what you *think* the old email address was he can send a PW reset to your current email; I just recovered this 12yo account using that method
 
if you email [email protected] and tell him the username and what you *think* the old email address was he can send a PW reset to your current email; I just recovered this 12yo account using that method
The window on my remembering what I used as a username when building my '01 system is long gone; even if I could get that account back at this point I probably have at least an order of magnitude more posts on the replacement account I created the 2nd time I was building a PC.
 
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