[conspire] Re: Last Year's Supercomputer

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark S Bilk (markbilk at attbi.com):

> Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions in response to my 
> original message.  You've helped me select a much better system 
> than I had originally chosen!

Yr. most welcome!  Enjoy your new system.

> CL2 is CAS latency 2

Please note that CAS2 must be specified relative to a specific
memory-bus speed, or it doesn't mean anything.  A vendor saying "Oh,
yes, sure this RAM will do CAS2 operation" could mean at 66 MHz.

> Asus tech support says that running RAM faster than the CPU actually
> slows down performance....

<snort>

There's roughly zero risk of that when your CPU is running at 2 GHz.
Remember, that's the whole reason we have L1 and L2 caches.

> They say Corsair and Mushkin are best.

My experience is Mushkin way out in front, then Crucial and Corsair.
The differences lie mainly in defect percentages.  (Of course, those
percentages also tend to differ dramatically by vendor, since the really
cheap RAM vendors often are hitting their price point by selling
seconds, OEM pull units, customer returns, etc.)

Interesting article on RAM (but based on a sample of just one RAM set
from each of the three manufacturers):
http://www.8ballshardware.com/articles/ddrcompare/page1.cfm

I like the Central Computer people very much -- on account of them
having good prices and actually bothering to keep in stock quite a few
things I'd actually consider buying -- but I'd never, ever, ever listen
to their advice on parts selection.

> Although the ide-scsi driver for IDE CD-R drives can occasionally hang
> the kernel, it will be unnecessary in kernel 2.6.

Quite right; the dedicated driver will be able to hang the kernel
directly.  ;->

-- 
Cheers,              First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing, for
Rick Moen            verbing weirds language.  Then, they arrival for the nouns
rick at linuxmafia.com  and I speech nothing, for I no verbs. - Peter Ellis