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.

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?

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.