Recently I wanted to upgrade to a new CPU from my old Celeron 566@ 850. I was
stuck in deciding between going with a PIII 750 over clocked or going with a
Thunderbird/Duron over clocked. The main problem I had was that I thought I
would have to buy new memory to be able to get 133+ memory bus on the over
clock. I ended up going with the Thunderbird (650mhz from
OverClockWarehouse) for the
performance over the PIII and the fact that I could run it at 100fsb with my
current memory if needed. I ended up being very surprised at how high my old
Mushkin budget memory that I bought almost 2 years ago went.
First, here are the specs of the test system, then we'll move on to some
background before we get into actual numbers.
Test System Configuration
In April of 1999 I got a job as a computer technician at a local shop in the
small town I lived in. I was horrified to find out that they were paying more
"wholesale" for no name memory than Mushkin was asking for their budget memory.
I soon talked my boss into ordering memory from Mushkin. Very soon memory prices
dropped even more so I bought 3 sticks of 128mb SDRAM to put in my home systems.
As you can see from the above picture these are 8ns chips made by M.tec. I had
always assumed they would be good to 125mhz or so but never thought they would
work at 133mhz or above.
I'll be right back, I've run out of cigs and beer so I need to dress my naked
ass and go to the store.
