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

• Abit KT7a RAID (review soon)
• AMD Athlon 650 at 900mhz, 936mhz, and 933mhz
• 256mb of Mushkin Budget PC100 SDRAM
• Creative Labs Annihilator 32mb DDR (GeForce 1)
• Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Controller
• 3com 905B NIC
• Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live Value
• 9.1gb 10k rpm Western Digital Vantage SCSI Hard drive
• Aopen 6x DVDROM
• HP 8100i CDRW
• Windows 2000 Professional

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.

 

Next page: Running some numbers

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