High Performance DDR2 Memory Breaks 1.25GHz

TrackinYeti writes "Performance PC Memory manufacturer, Corsair recently released a new addition to their flagship Dominator line of desktop memory, the TWIN2X2048-10000C5DF. This 2GB DDR2 memory kit features the company's DHX Dual Path Heat Xchange cooling technology, support for Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP), it includes one of Corsair's Dominator active memory coolers, and it's rated for operation at a currently industry leading 1.25GHz."

Comments

Does it come with an air conditioner?

[scgops]

Lovely speed, but I wonder what all that heat output will do the ambient temperature.

Re:Does it come with an air conditioner?

[cyrtainne]

They better have some good case fans. Doesn't seem to be very efficient with all of that heat output. You could probably heat one room with that system - a lot of electricity being turned into heat instead of processing power - I wonder how much is lost.

Re:Does it come with an air conditioner?

[JRHelgeson]

There are propane powered refrigerators that heat a mixture of primarily Ammonia. After the boiler it goes to a condenser where the liquid is held under pressure. The evaporator drops the pressure, and with pressure drop the temp drops as well providing ice cold temps so you can have a propane powered fridge or freezer.

http://www.propanerefrigerators.com/how.html

Re:I've got it

[Anonymous Coward]

im sorry but there must be something better to do with all that money other than spend it on hardware that will be outdated in 6 months.

Memory speed is how relevant to system operation?

[Glowing Fish]

Two questions?

1. How relevant is it to have memory that is this fast? As I understand it, no matter how fast memory is, if there isn't enough of it, your computer has to read and write from swap space on the hard drive, and even the fastest harddrive is at least a million times slower than slow memory, since it is a matter of nanoseconds vs. milliseconds (someone might correct me on the technicalities of this). So wouldn't lots of normal speed, or even slow memory, work better than too little ultra-fast memory? (Someone should just build a system that can support 8 gigs of 30 pin SiMMs!)

2. Am I a cranky old man who isn't up on this trend of memory needing active cooling? The closest I've seen is RAMBUS with aluminum sinks built in. It seems that no matter how efficient the cooling system claims to be, active cooling is another thing that can go wrong. I would much rather have slower memory that I don't have to worry about frying, then fast memory that is dependent on a fan that may break.

So, with those things in mind, how worthwhile is this?

That's processors have caches (lots of)

[vlad_petric]

and yeah, BFCs (big, fast caches) are far more important than fast main memory for the majority of applications. Nevertheless, these fast memories sell really well on the enthusiast market, where most people don't really know what a cache really is.

Re:But does it come with ECC?

[DaleGlass]

Indeed. I've been badly burned with memory problems before, so now I only buy ECC.

I had a particularly nasty incident. My firewall had been running for months without problems, until one day it crashed. I thought oh well, maybe it hit an obscure kernel bug. Rebooted it. Several days later it crashed again. Rebooted it again. The next time it crashed but didn't boot again as it had corrupted its disk, and I had a really fun day reinstalling it with no internet connection.

My current box takes DDR2 800. I was going to get ECC, but they only had DDR2 666 available. I decided to go with the normal stuff. It passed memtest86, and I started installing gentoo. After a few hours bizarre compilation errors started to happen, and gcc started segfaulting. Turns out the RAM was very slightly bad. So slightly that I had to test it for 10 hours straight to see the problem.

Went back to the shop, exchanged it for the slower ECC. Can't see any noticeable performance difference, and it's rock solid now. It really irks me how for some bizarre reason there's error correction everywhere, on every kind storage media, except RAM, where for some reason it's an "enterprise feature".

Re:But does it come with ECC?

[amorsen]

[Please don't waste time trying to convince me I don't need ECC.
SGIs taught me otherwise and soft error rates really are on the rise. Just answer the question thanks.]

Can I convince you that you don't need registered RAM? It isn't the ECC that is killing speed, it's the buffers.

Memory has gotten ridiculous

[billcopc]

The memory companies seem to be fighting the Ghz wars of yesteryear. They release these "performance" products that boast tighter timings and higher clocks, that don't translate into significant real-world performance gains because the bottlenecks usually lie elsewhere, like the northbridge or on-CPU memory controller. Corsair strikes me as a big marketing machine with just a few uber-hyped products. Truth is, in my experiences I've seen more Corsair memory cause problems than the generic stuff, mostly because they often employ weird timings that are misdetected or even unsupported by the motherboard. The fact is that their target market is a bunch of Red Bull chugging gamer types, that don't know squat and think 1% is significant. They remind me of a certain subclass of audiophiles, people who have been caught in the sticky web of disinformation that's out there... people who will fight you to the death over the quality of their hand-made oxygen-free triple-plated phase-aligned one-way audio cables.

I can tell you quite honestly that if I had to plunk down an extra 200$ on my PC, I'd get the cheap ram and bump the CPU up a few hundred MHz. Specially tuned memory is for specially tuned applications, you know, like a real-time zillion-core supercomputer!