Rambus RDRAM Pentium 4 1.4 GHz vs Pentium III

[@juniorbcm5375]

1.4 GHz Tualatin vs. 1.4 GHz Willamette vs. 1.4 GHz Athlon!

[@philscomputerlab]

For sure :D

[@RetroTinkerer]

First gen Socket A athlon at 1.4Ghz or XP at 1.4Ghz?

[@soylentgreenb]

Thunderbird 1400c, last of the athlons, feels more interesting.

[@juniorbcm5375]

Alberto Martinez I think 1st gen would provide more equivalent results. XP should be compared to the 478 platform.

[@TheMorc]

Junior BCM, oh I was scared of that fly :D

[@rd946]

Back in the day before DDR, the higher clocked P4's with RAMBUS would blister the paint off the walls compared to other systems. I even had a RAMBUS cooler with its own little fan. Today, it's one of my Win98SE retro machines.

[@thefadebeta580]

I worked at CompUSA back in the day and sold these machines: Many customers who bought these Pentium 4 machines had concerns about the heat they were generating... If my memory serves me well, most, if not all, of the P4s we sold were made by HP. The towers themselves were absolutely huge, partly because they needed room for heat displacement. There were recalls on some of the early models because the CD-ROMs would malfunction due to the heat generated.

[@ChannelSho]

Funny to see RAM with "don't touch, it's hot!" warning labels on it.

[@greyfox37]

My college computer was a P4 1.8 had 256MB of non ECC RDRAM 800MHz. I remember opening the case and seeing the little RIMM sticks wondering what the hell they were, then when I looked it up, I laughed at not only having to pair them, but how expensive it was too. Ah, memories.

[@BaumInventions]

Some weeks ago i found several Rambus Jumper Modules in a Package of random stuff. Im always fascinated by old tech that only lasted a short period of time ... Like VLB or those strange AMR, CNR connectors.

[@Wushu-viking]

Great video. I have only a one time experienced a first gen P4 1.4 with Rambus memory back in 2001. I worked at a computer repair shop. We got this machine in that was unstable. The first time seing memory modules with heatsinks on it. WOW! As I remember the P4 was better performing on intensive tasks with RamBus memory, than with DDR. But it was shortlived in the mainstream market. I think it was too expensive memory and with high CL (went on to server use) It got replased with DDR memory on later P4 mainboards.

[@scooter4196]

I've always thought RAMBUS was really interesting. Thanks for the video :)

[@johncate9541]

Rambus was fast, but it was very expensive and the company itself had a dreadful reputation. When DDR came, it was almost as fast, much cheaper, and was an open standard, unlike Rambus.

[@zyborg47]

My mate have still a P4 machine with Rambus, it have not been used for a while, but I remember the memory being expesnive and it certainly got hot.

[@daves4424]

Thanks for this, such an interesting time for a retro build of P4 Win 98 vs PIII w ISA for high end DOS inc SB compatability.

[@Disobeyedtoast]

1.4 GHz PIII vs P4?

[@laharl2k]

PIII wins

[@moritzrudolf5370]

For comparison, I think a 1GHz PIII (properly configured) could keep up with a 2GHz P4. That's how much worse Intel's IPC got back than.

[@MasterDXT]

I vote for this idea! :D

[@agdgdgwngo]

Watch the p3 tualatin review my friend I think Phil uses a P 4 2000 as comparison

[@POKEMANZZ3]

Disobeyedtoast ^^^ id love to see this tested once and for all the early benchmarks didnt indicate much iirc

[@Cyrix_Op]

One of the big reasons Rambus was so expensive is that each memory stick had its own memory controller. Early on RAMBUS was faster, eventually the advancements of memory. When DDR ram was released performance was on par or better for cheaper. That was the death of Rambus.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

You sure about that? Drilled the rivets out of one and there's only the ram chips on board.

[@LS3ftw15]

Awesome! I made a comment mentioning the Willamette/RDRAM combo on a previous Pentium III vs Pentium 4 video, and within a month you've got a video up. Your channel is one of my favorites on KZbin.

[@LS3ftw15]

Also, I've been itching to play around with a Socket 423 i850 board. This video is going to end up making me buy one.

[@jeremyjohnson8844]

Great vid. Tualatin and Thunderbird were such amazing designs. Willamette was inexcusably slow and expensive. RDR was ahead of the curve, but didn't perform on a reasonable cost:performance level. Northwood was P4's real intro, specifically NW C. The 1.4GHz P3 (even generally in massively OCed Coppermine form) will simply stand on top of the podium almost always. Edit: I edited this post. :p

[@kf4hnf]

Hi Phil I was watching some of your older video's and I want to thank you for dropping the background music in your newer video's. when you get older it's harder to separate sounds. Even thought yours wasn't to loud, I don't understand why some people including the movie industry think the background music has to be so bloody loud.

[@TrueThanny]

07:52 The reason for the complications brought up are that motherboards used to use the 5V rail to power the CPU. This meant as chips got faster and more power hungry, PSU's got bigger and bigger 5V rails. The 12V rail was typically fairly weak, since all it need to power were some peripherals. Then motherboards started using 12V to generate the CPU core voltage. There was a period of time where it was common to find both 5V and 12V motherboards, so you had to choose chip and board before getting the right kind of PSU. And now, if you're building a retro PC with a 5V CPU board, you're going to have a hard time finding a suitable PSU.

[@RetroTinkerer]

I never even considered anything by Intel at that time, I remember first the slot A Athlons and later socket A offered better price / performance ratio. I will need to check back Anan's and Tom's old reviews to see why I choosed Athlons for so much time! 😊

[@ornim1]

I remember back in 2002 in Bangladesh, with the price of one 128mn RD-RAM stick, you could buy a cpu+mobo+sdram(256mb) combo

[@cyberholix]

I was always curious about how these Rambus modules performed, but had no opportunity to check it out. Very informative hands-on video.

[@titotech]

Phil, you are the BEST! thank you very much for doing videos based on coments asks.

[@Silikone]

I'd love to see an apples-to-apples RDRAM VS SDRAM comparison.

[@UpLateGeek]

Really looking forward to seeing RD vs DDR RAM, and Intel vs Via chipsets. I went AMD for a while after my P3, so I pretty much ignored any P4 reviews. I was fresh out of high school, so an Intel system was pretty much out of my price range. Only went back to Intel in 2007, so it'll be interesting to see what I missed out on.

[@batmangovno]

Hot damn, what an interesting topic! Rambus's XDR RAM was also in the PlayStation 3 by the way :)

[@Lion_McLionhead]

Old enough to have used lots of RAMBUS systems. It was the standard for corporate IT departments, from 2001-2004.

[@Nemesizzonline]

I recently got (after quite a search) a Pentium 4 socket 423 model with SD-RAM (yup, that's right, it was the 'budget' chipset for the Pentium 4). And it made a huge difference using PC100 or PC133 SD-RAM (in Quake 3, the difference was around 20FPS between PC100 and 133). Early P4's were realy dependent on fast memory to perform. I do like the 423 more than the 478, because the 423 is more rare. Though that rarity has a lot of downsides; they're hard to find (for a reasonable price), hard to find coolers that fit, RAM can be tricky to find (in the case of RDRAM, SD-RAM ofcourse is quite easy). Dispite they are actualy not that good (compared to the Athlon or P3 Tualtin), I find them actualy more fun to have than some modern stuff (let's face it, modern hardware is a bit...boring, even an old Sandybridge CPU is still capable of running most things without trouble).

[@philscomputerlab]

That time is super interesting, like how AMD went with DDR and how well the Athlon and Duron performed. We will take a look at these soon.

[@PearComputingDevices]

oh my goodness you finally did it! Good stuff Phil!!! I still got an RDRAM system. I have both 800 and 1024 memory, and memory options. YOu can run up to the 3.0 with hyperthread, and have but it's a cooker. You could fry eggs or better yet dry cook food. Because it's hot, ho, hot. I would argue hotter then a dual 2.5 ghz G5 with roughly the same latency performance give or take. Seriously geekbench that. Anyway, awesome video. Mac heads would complain about the G5, my guess is they never touched RDRAM.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea still got to find a 533 FSB capable RDRAM motherboard :)

[@PearComputingDevices]

+PhilsComputerLab The thing is the higher speeds you go the less the gain seems to be until you go with an 800 MHz CPU that RDRAM doesn't officially support. I've ran these at 400 MHz fsb for giggles and a slightly cooler experience, but it also ran much slower. It's an interesting board as it's not picky whatsoever as to what CPUs you can use. If it has a 478 pin, it seems to work. It came out of a gateway e series. That was back when Gateway still had some quality aspects to them.

[@KuntalGhosh]

congratulations on 40,004 subs!

[@shadowtheimpure]

I had a Rambus system back in the day...I loved that computer, used it throughout college.

[@WaybackTECH]

If you want to really give RAMBUS it's best chance, get yourself some of the PC1066-32 stuff. The latency was always the big performance killer on RAMBUS systems, regardless of PIII or P4. I do have a theory that RAMBUS would probably really come into it's own with Pentium D, whether it is competitive with DDR2 with the Pentium D processors I kind of doubt, but would love to test anyway, but of course, there were no Socket 775 motherboards made with RAMBUS, but if by some chance I am wrong about that, and Google searches have hidden the truth as it sometimes does, I would be VERY interested in finding such a board.

[@Lady_Zenith]

Rambus was really only good back in the day. In the days of Pentium D or 775, no chance. The problem was that yet it ran on 800-1066Mhz, but it was only 16-bit. So total 32-bit in dual-channel. It became obsolete when Intel came with 865 which had DDR dual-channel which had both better latency and bandwith than RDRAM. Dual channel DDR400 is league ahead of any RDRAM. Dual channel DDR266 is equal to 1066 RDRAM system.

[@WaybackTECH]

RDRAM memory came in both 16 and 32 bit, maxing out at PC or "RIMM" 6400. Chipsets ranged from single up to 4 channel.

[@Lady_Zenith]

Yeah but the 32-bit ones were really rare, only few of the latest I850E boards had them and the controller was 32-bit as a whole, so the same bandwidth was still the same you jut did not have to "bother" with the dual channel. 64-bit controller never existed on the retail market, SIS made a chipset that was supposed to have it, but from what Iv heard everyone backed away from making boards on it cause of well... it was RDRAM and it was in the time Intel was making I865 already.

[@BeachTechPC]

I have only ever built one system with RDRAM in it. Nobody wanted to pay the high cost of it back in the day. P4 chipset's with DDR came along fairly quickly and that was the end for RDRAM. Nintendo kept RDRAM around with the N64 for awhile.

[@dmnsonic]

Excellent video Phil, I'm always curious about YOU testing Rambus P4 series and you got attention about this but try to find a socket 423 motherboard to match the period and possible performance problems it can have.

[@novertrunnions2721]

This is awesome, since I just recently grabbed a retro workstation at a recycling center. It had a D850EMV2 in it, however, apparently you got lucky, since almost all of the large power capacitors on mine were bloating and leaking. It may be that this board had a much higher uptime than yours and that's why the capacitors failed eventually. As for what you said about it being extremely stable, I can definitely back up that assessment, it is probably the most stable system I've ever set up. I bet that's probably due to the fact that your RDRAM and mine is ECC (Error-correcting code memory), unlike most SDRAM which isn't ECC (Though in some very rare cases it can be). As always, great video, I still really enjoy them :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Good point, the upgraded RDRAM I used (The two 256 sticks from Electromyne) are ECC as well. I didn't consider that this might help with the stability, it makes sense though.

[@c0ldw1nd27]

I still have a couple of Northwoods (a 2.5 GHz @ 2.8GHz and a 3.0GHz HT @ 3.4 GHz HT), and although they are a bit slow, they are perfectly usable with windows 7 for office use, web browsing, older and current light games, as NAS servers,...

[@colinstu]

Would've been fun to see it compared to the 1.4GHz P3!

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea that will come!

[@erazorCTF]

I would LOVE to see a comparison of Tualatin vs. Northwood on RDRAM, DDR, and SDR. :-)

[@bdhale34]

DDR was faster lots faster as Rambus had latency issues that crippled it's high bandwidth advantage. Note that even on official Intel produced Desktop 845 boards only use DDR ram not rambus they dropped it hard and there was good reason it was horrible for value

[@agdgdgwngo]

YES!

[@Lady_Zenith]

The best system those days were still RDRAM based, I remember the first 3+Ghz Northwood and the same time the first one with HT, aka the 3,06Ghz one with FSB533, that was still paired with I850E and ideally 1066Mhz RDRAM. i845 and SIS645 with DDR was good but still a bit slower than i850E, DDR overtook RDRAM completely only when I865 came with dual-channel and DDR400 + FSB800 support. However the SDRAM P4 systems were completely trash and Phils future tests will prove that for sure.

[@kathleendelcourt8136]

As expected the 1.4Ghz RDRAM P4 really shines in Quake 3, otherwise it struggles to beat a PIII only running at 1Ghz.

[@AncientElectronics]

I was also surprised on the stability of my socket 423 board. Two other big negatives of using a socket 423 board as opposed to a socket 478 is with socket 423 your going to need a power supply with an AUX connector. Also socket 423 has become a bit of an oddity collectors board so prices are usually a bit high compared to 478.

[@WaybackTECH]

Or just buy a Asus P4T like I did and use a standard ATX PSU with it and not mess with the AUX stuff.

[@AncientElectronics]

Cool, didn't know about that board.

[@AncientElectronics]

Cool, every other socket 423 board I've ever seen had that AUX connector. good old Asus.

[@AncientElectronics]

I just looked the board up and it does have an AUX connector. Maybe it just wasn't necessary.

[@rasz]

molex to AUX connector converters are $0.99 on ebay, not an insurmountable problem

[@mighoet]

I'm glad you finally build a Pentium 4. I myself own a Intel Pentium 4 2.9 Ghz Northwood chip, with a GeForce 6200.

[@3DfxAslinger]

I dont't like the netburst architektur from intel, but I like to see new videos from phil. :)

[@MasticinaAkicta]

Sigh rambus memory, still got a bad taste in my mouth about their company. Sneaking certain technology in the DDR standard then later suing and winning a lawsuit against the DDR makers. Still oh well, that is long ago right. And the P III is a nice chip, it ran the OG Xbox. Pretty well actually. And the Nintendo 64 had Rambus, in such that you could add 4Mbyte of extra memory, doubling it, by replacing a small dongle shaped part. Also the early Pentium 4 had too little cache to really stretch its legs, only around the 2ghz it really begin stretch it legs and never let go!

[@smbu]

That was the "terminator" in the N64 slot. You needed it there if you didn't have the extra memory module installed. Just like Phil had to use the terminator sticks in the empty RDRAM slots on the P4 system.

[@IronicTonic8]

Enjoying the direction you're going with the reviews, looking forward to reviews of the P4 with SDR and DDR memory, as well as the P4 with different speeds. Just built a 1.8ghz P4 system based around the Intel 865 chipset for windows 98 and a little bit of early xp gaming. Would love to see how it stacks up. I was a big Amd fan back in the day, so Im also looking forward to some amd benchmarks from this era.

[@IronicTonic8]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I'd love to see some Tualatin benchmarks thrown in there. My first ever retro build was a Tualatin 1.4. This would be a good baseline system to compare everything against.

[@philscomputerlab]

i865 is my favourite chipset!

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea just matter of time really.

[@IronicTonic8]

PhilsComputerLab Yeah, gotta love the i865, very fast, flexible and has a good mix of modern features and legacy support. I've got the Asus P4P800 SE.

[@burdebc1]

I had a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 with SDRAM and while shopping I remember specifically making sure it didn't use RDRAM because of the problems it had.

[@Redmage913]

I worked at a computer repair shop in the late 2000s, and a customer had us effectively max out his Pentium 4 RDRAM machine. I think we increased RAM to 2GB and shoved an early Intel SSD into it. I had never seen .NET updates install so fast before. Given the right level of supporting hardware, P4 could be great in offices. It just wasn’t worth the price.

[@Ben333bacc]

FINALLY!! YOu gotta do 1.4 p4 vs 1.4 p3 though!!!!

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea that wiill come soon :)

[@stamasd8500]

Very nice comparison. I have only started playing with P4 systems in the past 2 years; I skipped the P4 altogether at the time it was current (Athlon XP, then Athlon64). The systems I'm most fond of for retrogaming are in fact 2 which I built on i850-based motherboards, both socket423. One is with a 1.8GHz Willamette, the other with the rarer 2GHz. As for the rambus, it has higher bandwidth but also higher latency which cuts the performance. The way I deal with the heat is to replace the original fan on the CPU cooler with a bigger one, 120mm fan that blows not only on the CPU heatsink but also on the memory. Works well. (the motherboards I use are QDI which I mentioned in a previous comment; they have PC/PCI so good sound card compatibility for DOS). I also have a socket423 motherboard with Via chipset, a PcChips M920 with V4x266, supports both SDRAM and DDR. TBH I haven't made a build with it yet for lack of time. It would be interesting to see how it compares to the 850-based boards.

[@custardo]

I still have my old Abit TH7II-Raid motherboard lying around somewhere, I suppose its worth checking if it still works. But back in 2002 it was part of a great setup, the price of the memory was the only issue I had with RDRAM. Maybe it wasn't the fastest, but as a software engineer stability always comes before performance.

[@lucaspam]

Nice video as always, Phil! I wonder how the 1.4 Tualatin would score against this p4 setup. I wonder also what would be the first p4 to beat consistently the Tualatin on benchmarks. Never seen nothing about RDRAM before. Very fun stuff.

[@Protoking]

After reading a bunch about netburst to satisfy my odd fetish for it I can say it’s commonly accepted that the 1.7GHz P4 is considered the one that did that.

[@Bige4u]

Happy b-day to me, and on that note.... i've aquired many PC parts since my very first computer back in mar96, a complete 486 dx4-100mhz system for $1200, wish i still had it for nostalga sake. But along the way, i came into posession a set of RAMBUS memory, not sure how it came about and i never tested it, so here it sits as one of many a collectors item.

[@agevenisse3252]

Maybe it's a bit off topic, but my first experience with the P4 Platform was a 2.4 GHz Celeron. It replaced my old 1.2 GHz "P3 Celeron" running on a Tualatin-slotket converter on Abit BH6 (overclocked to 1344MHz with 112MHz FSB). I expected the P4 Celeron to be quite a bit faster, but it was slower in most games. Perhaps your could do some tests on the P4 Celerons? I don't think there was anything wrong with my motherboard (Abit IS7-E). I replaced the CPU with a 2.6GHz P4 Northwood, and the performance improved a lot. I still have this system, and a newer IS7-E2 with a Prescott 3.2GHz that also works really well (and hot).

[@Knaeckebrotsaege]

I actually have the Aldi PC hardware bundle (CPU/Board/GPU) from the November 2001 Aldi PC somewhere. If you need anything benchmarked or details about it, let me know and I'll dig it out

[@philscomputerlab]

Nah all good. I did ask a German eBay seller if they wanted to work with me, but never heard back.

[@Knaeckebrotsaege]

Work with you as in..? Send you the HW, help you out with the specs or run benchmarks for you? The "never heard back" part unfortunately sounds familiar. It's usually what happens when I ask US sellers if they'd be willing to ship the item(s) to Germany...

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea they sell all the Aldi motherboards. Nah don't need help with benchmarks LOL

[@pedroroberto4109]

Great videos! Watching on my Pentium 4 HT 3.2GHz (Prescott, 1MB cache, FSB 800MHz, socket 478) with GeForce 6800 (256MB GDDR3, AGP 8x) and 2GB of DDR-400MHz. I don't know why people say the Prescott is so hot, i'm using the Intel cooler that came with the CPU and it runs below 55ºC. I'm testing how it performs on the internet, KZbin plays normally on 480p, on 720p the video lags too much. I built it about 1,5 years ago, i have a bunch of PCs, the newest is a Core 2 Quad and the oldest is a 486, but i wanted to know the Pentium 4, which i had never used yet. I was used to Core 2 Duo performance. When i was building my P4, i was expecting much less from a CPU from 2004. When i finished building it and installed Windows Vista, i got impressed. I love my Pentium 4, i don't care that much about efficiency. It needs more clock speed to beat a Pentium III, but it can reach *much* higher clock speeds than the Pentium III (3.8GHz vs. 1.4GHz), thus increasing performance. That is, in fact, an inefficient strategy, but if you just think about the performance, i think the Pentium 4 has very good performance (at least at 3.2GHz, the only Pentium 4 i have ever used yet).

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks for the comment!

[@ChrisR3tro]

Comparing it to the Tualatin at 1.4ghz would also have been very interesting as their clock speeds match

[@philscomputerlab]

Yup that will come soon.

[@carlosnumbertwo]

When I was 13 or so I had a socket 423 with rdram. I used to slay in quake 3! lol.

[@corneliusantonius3108]

Yeah I had that Williamnette PC with that Ram once given to me, Sold it as an oddity for good money.

[@ching-chenhuang8119]

Gotta love Intel, they dare to throw tons of money promoting something nobody wants....

[@jawtheshark]

I found a RAMBUS system ages ago in a dumpster. It was indeed interesting to play around with. Guess, I should have kept it and resold on eBay ;-)

[@MusicHavenSG]

I remember my first Pentium 4 System I got was a Williamette 1.8, operating on SDRAM not RDRAM though. Even though the mobo has long been dead, I still hang on to the it. the mobo was the Gigabyte 8I845GE-RZ on the Intel 845G Chipset, also socket 478.

[@TechNoPhobiaGirl]

Been wondering for a long time why you've never used/reviewed a socket 423 P4. Since it was the first P4 socket, I would have thought you would have been all over that one a LONG time ago. I had quite a few socket 423 boards/processors back in the hey-day.

[@mikv8]

Comparing P4 with the P3 using different memory isn't quite fair. You should compare P4 on i850/i860 with the P3 on i820/i840

[@PearComputingDevices]

I own a Gateway e-Series motherboard, basically a plain jane Intel board. Mine has 1066 MHz RDRAM or 533 MHz FSB. I have a 3.0 with hyperthreading, and a 2.4 GHz CPU. Both are pretty fast. I usually just use the 2.4 for classic games. I have a fan shield over my ram sticks as yes, these do get insanely hot and for a longer life it's probably best to keep them cooler. It is very stable too, but I am sure it was hardly competitive with the AMD Athlon XP, marginal at best with gaming, content creation is a whole other matter.

[@renatoigmed]

I have one Pentium IV with 512MB RAMBUS and still works like a charm after 16 years old I just switched the HD and the video card

[@SolidSonicTH]

My dad's Pentium 4 Dell Dimension 8100 had 256MB of RDRAM. An interesting moment in time.

[@brostenen]

Well... I used to have an Intel-VC820 and an P3-500 slot1. Though it was not really the fastest combination, it was rock solid. I used 2x128mb PC-800 ram modules on it from samsung that had heatsinks. As I said... Rock solid and stable.

[@rich1051414]

Shouldn't you put the levers in opposite directions? I remember it being recommended to do this as levering them the same direction could potentially chip the die under the heat spreader.

[@vonhapen1]

Thank you very much for this very interesting and informing video. I always thought that to be a very interesting and stable memory system, even if it had a very short lifetime.

[@xiardark]

Love the video! I'm sure you've mentioned before, or posted a link, however, what is your methodology in testing/benchmarking windows games? Also, from your previous video, where did you get the older drivers? I could not get the nVidia website to show me the versions listed in your video.

[@philscomputerlab]

They are on our website.

[@Kyanzes]

Terminator modules, also the RAM runs at 800 MHz. Hmm... T800. Anyways, yeah, I recall these, a friend had it and I was so envious! Had to be installed in pairs and, indeed, required terminators for the empty sockets, similarly to SCSI termination. Anyways, it was ridiculously expensive.

[@fuzzymonkey87]

Dude I love the way you say "motherboard". I don't know why. Great video as usual :)

[@3800S1]

mudaboard*

[@TopiasSalakka]

My first PC was a free turd with a PGA478 Celeron. It barely ran Star Wars Battlefront 2 and the audio was laggy. Got another free PC with a Pentium 4 and a dead motherboard, i think it was a 2.8GHz model, and BF2 ran beautifully at 1280x1024 with not much lag.

[@stevef6392]

Great video! If you ever get the chance to, you should do an Overclocked PIII-S (say, 1575MHz w/ FSB150) vs Overclocked Willamette (they seem to max out at around 2.2GHz). That would be an unusual and fun video.

[@dos1044]

I have actually a Pentium III Dell from 2001 that has RD-RAM

[@1pcfred]

I ran a Gateway 2 GHz Pentium 4 with RAMBUS RAM for a long time. I retired that system and when I tried to fire it back up about a year later it gave me some kind of an error about the hard disk controller. I guess I got out of it in the nick of time? It was OK but it was just too slow compared to multi core systems that came after it. I'd say it was way faster than the 1 GHz P3 I had.

[@-Kerstin]

I would like some history as to why Intel went with the Rambus instead of the SDRAM! Thanks for the awesome videos

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea I'm more into the testing and benchmarking, not so much a history channel. Others do this much better than me :D

[@-Kerstin]

No worries :)

[@mauricevde]

I like the video, this reminds me of getting 2 sticks 232pin rdram for my asus p4t533.

[@bdhale34]

OMG I remember that Rambus Intel tried to push it was faster a lot faster once it got going, it's problem was with latency if I recall.. it was so high of latency that it ended up having less overall performance.

[@GiSWiG]

I remember selling my dad's old RAMBUS RAM on ebay, about two years after they stopped making it, 512MB I think. He couldn't believe it sold for over $300, more than twice what he paid for it. After RAMBUS was discontinued, RAMBUS RAM skyrocketed 2x-3x times it original price. It was like what DDR4 is now.

[@BrianMartin2007]

Higher bandwidth at the cost of latency.. Wasn't good for gaming really at the time but large data sets did well, like Video editing and such..

[@sburton015]

I remember when a desktop gateway PC that had a 1.5 ghz Pentium 4 with 256 mbs of PC800 RDRam and either had Windows 98 or Me was top of the line in January of 2001. Rdram seems like it never did last long though, I think by 2002, most PC s were using ddr 266 and 333 mhz sdram instead of the short lived rdram.

[@PiercedJedi]

I never had a Pentium 3/4 until they switched to LGA775 because back then I was very budget conscious and knew I could get better performance from AMD, the reason I finally switched was actually due to the stability problems I was experiencing with the AMD chips of the time

[@3800S1]

I had issues with the sis chipsets for AMD, but I got better boards with via and best was nforce2. They performed great and were stable.

[@Reziac]

RAMBUS also comes in several speeds, and has to be matched to the system, or it won't work. In my own Computer Closet I have Jerry Pournelle's old "Regina" -- a Compaq dual Xeon 750MHz (CPUs on slot cards) that has 8 RAMBUS slots. It boots so slow it looks hung, but runs like the wind once it gets going (having Win2K as its OS doubtless helps). It came with 512mb and I wanted to upgrade it, but RDRAM was always too expensive. Last year I saw some on eBay that was cheap, but a brand I'd never heard of. Well, let's try it. Turns out this off-brand runs cool enough to touch, with about a 5% speed penalty, so for a mere $4/stick, that's a good trade-off. This machine is a curiosity in other ways -- it has a backplane rather than a regular motherboard (CPUs and RAM are all on a card that's as big as a regular mainboard), passive cooling, and two SCSI hard drives. And it weighs 70 pounds!!!!!

[@Bort_86]

I remember my dad had the PIII-Aldi-PC with 1 GHz you mention. I wonder how you as Aussie know the offers from a German discount chain?

[@philscomputerlab]

The Internet. :D

[@FoxMccloud42]

There are mainboard with certain chipset for the pentium 3 that supports rambus-ram.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea, I looked for one for a while, but they are super hard to find, expensive, and the Pentium III performs really well with regular SDRAM, doesn't gain much from DDR or RDRAM.

[@FoxMccloud42]

I know. I'm on the hunt for a Intel Desktop Board vc820 for a xbox alpha clone build, but the are expensive and rare.

[@alvaroacwellan9051]

Mine is a HP (AFAIK it's a rebranded FIC) KC19+ with i820 chipset. Nice and fun but otherwise it can't benefit from the extra bandwidth of the RDRAM at all. As for P4 RDRAM I went with socket 423 because I already had a good Swiss army knife i865 board that supports every S478 CPU. Those S423 CPUs are so awkwardly cute :D

[@nix123ism]

Dell Optiplex GX200 system has Pentium 3 , RDRAM, inbuilt Nvidia TNT2 (?) no AGP slot though, had one for a few years, not having an agp slot killed it for me, was a fairly quick system from memory

[@alvaroacwellan9051]

HP KC19+, on the other hand, has both an AGP and 2 ISA slots. It still isn't really faster than a BX board - but it can use 1.5V AGP cards and has a proper AGP clock divisor for 133MHz FSB. And it's more unique.

[@Great.Milenko]

sooo, to sum up inconsistent improvement over a 1ghz P3, with larger improvements at higher resolutions and with more demanding titles but about the same performance with less demanding titles and lower resolutions, probably not worth the hassle?

[@EscapeVelo]

I have a couple of RAMBUS sticks that came out of a Pentium 4 1.4 GHz system. Didnt know what they were for a long time. LOL!

[@fenixlolnope361]

Northwood wasn't on 423? Why didn't you underclock?

[@wii166]

Dude you own the market with these videos you really do i love every single one of them i for sure loved that Athlon vs Pentium 4 battle. Would love to see more of that content but from the 90's that would be epic!

[@dimasferrer2025]

The first pentium 4 with rambus memory is the Pentium 4 socket 423.. In this huge socket... The 478 is modern than old 423 socket

[@philscomputerlab]

I explain this in the video, so I'm not sure what this comment is for?

[@sergito2040]

interesting video never knew about rambus ram I remember my celeron D had normal drr ram when my dad brought it brand new. I enjoy watching your videos since they solve some of my problems whit my reto windows 98 pc that is on hold while I get neither a Gforce or a ATI GPU since the Mx440 decise to die. I started using a old laptop whit xp it has a intel atom 1.6ghz the integrapich intel graphic 950 has a surprising good compatibility whit windows 98 and eairly 2000 games

[@shdowhunt60]

The performance is definitely unimpressive, and I think that it's definitely worth comparing it with competing architectures at the time. Especially the Tualatin Pentium III's.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

I've had pretty good experiences with Samsung's memory chips, both DRAM and NAND. Hell, imo the only GOOD thing Samsung is good at making is DRAM, NAND, and screen panels lol.

[@paveljelinek772]

Now use the same P4 at 1,4Ghz with sdram and P3 Tuallatin (also clocked at 1.4Ghz and YES it is possible)with the same modules od sdram and guess who'll win.. yes, and we have a winner ladies and gentlemen!!! P3 won! Of course doing some benches that utilize the instructions that P3 lacks (SSE i think) guess who'll win then..

[@spahndirge]

We had a Pentium 4 1.4 Ghz based Gateway machine in the early 2000’s...it was rubbish...reasonable specs on paper, but it never performed the way it should have, despite later investing in 1gb of RAMBUS RAM. The machine is long gone, but I still have the memory, which I doubt that I’d even be able to give away now.

[@TorqueEffect]

512MB of RAM? Bios to me looked like it was reporting 2 128MB sticks. 3:42

[@philscomputerlab]

RAM can be changed out :)

[@erminc1891]

Hey Phil great video, I´ve suggestion for you. Could you try the Asus CT-479 adapter on the Socket 478 Mainboard, and try a comparison between Pentium 4 3.0 GHz and Pentium M725-755?

[@cleanycloth]

I had an old Dell Dimension 8300 at one point that had a Socket 423 Pentium 4 and 768MB of RAMBUS RAM. It was...ehhh? Not great. In the end I just parted it out and dumped it because it was sometimes crashing to a blank screen and a yellow power light. Still have the CPU and RAM somewhere...not that I'll probably ever use them again :P The S423 CPUs are huuuuuge! They basically look like an S478 P4 on an adapter board, so strange.

[@Kenlauderdale123]

Why would you need a dummy module for the empty ram slots?

[@philscomputerlab]

Without them the system doesn't work, or not stable.

[@vdrand9893]

I had RDRAM back in 2002, to upgrade back then..that shit was waayyy to expensive :/

[@_Tualatin_]

Battle vs Tualatin pls.

[@CaptainsWorkspace]

Would have ben nice if you threw in a Or850 with a 1.4Ghz PIII in a slotket as it also have RDRAM. And compare it to the 1.4 Ghz P4 with RDRAM. Surely the PIII would win, but how mutch.

[@angieandretti]

Here's what I want to see - and I haven't found this anywhere so I'm really curious - apparently Intel made some Pentium III boards with RAMBUS memory support too! For example Victor Bart recently did a video featuring a Dell PC using the Intel 820 chipset + 800MHz Slot 1 Pentium III + RAMBUS memory. I remember a quote from somewhere "by the time Intel reached 1GHz on the Pentium III platform, the systems had largely become bottlenecked by the speed of the SD-RAM" so I want to see a same-spec Pentium III put through period-correct Win98 gaming benchmarks using both traditional SD-RAM and a RAMBUS board. Myself I love Slot 1 builds and I'm interested in building a Pentium III RAMBUS gaming PC for the exotic tech alone but the few boards I've seen for sale have been very expensive so for that price I want to know that there's actually a tangible performance increase.

[@mdrumt]

I remember finding a PC with this stuff in it back in the day for the first time and I was like wtf!? Rambus!? Never heard of it!