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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."

30 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Does it come with an air conditioner? by scgops · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Does it come with an air conditioner? by klingens · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Watercooling for memory is only a question of when, not if :)

    2. Re:Does it come with an air conditioner? by cyrtainne · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Does it come with an air conditioner? by Unique2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, it's a question that has already been answered.

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    4. Re:Does it come with an air conditioner? by master_p · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, having the PC open from one side, you don't need a heater in the cold winter. And in the summer, you can use the heat to powerup a small refrigerator, so you can have your beers near to the computer.

    5. Re:Does it come with an air conditioner? by JRHelgeson · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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

      --
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    6. Re:Does it come with an air conditioner? by jawtheshark · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hmmm, I wasn't aware of that technique.... Still, according to the article the heat need to be dissipated from the absorber. I don't know if you could use a CPU to heat the ammonia mixture, since the CPU needs to be cooled. I guess that using it as a heat source isn't sufficient to cool it.

      A new market for cases with built-in refrigerator? ;-) If it would work, I think someone would have done it by now...

      --
      Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  2. In other news, by Looce · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Performance $OBJECT manufacturer, $COMPANY recently released a new addition to their flagship $BRAND line of $OBJECT(s), the $MODELNUMBER. This $OBJECTDESCRIPTION features the company's $SUPERLONGFEATURENAME, support for $ANOTHERFEATURENAME ($ABBR), it includes one of $COMPANY's $OTHERPRODUCTHERE, and it's rated for operation at a currently industry leading $OWNAGESPEC."

    Seriously, this sounds a lot like any other marketing gimmick ever invented. And it is just asking for a car analogy. Simply replace $COMPANY with Chevrolet, and start imagining the rest..!

    1. Re:In other news, by alx5000 · · Score: 2, Funny

      "Performance $CAR->OBJECT manufacturer, $CAR->COMPANY recently released a new addition to their flagship $CAR->BRAND line of $CAR->OBJECT(s), the $CAR->MODELNUMBER. This $CAR->OBJECTDESCRIPTION features the company's $CAR->SUPERLONGFEATURENAME, support for $CAR->ANOTHERFEATURENAME ($CAR->ABBR), it includes one of $CAR->COMPANY's $CAR->OTHERPRODUCTHERE, and it's rated for operation at a currently industry leading $CAR->OWNAGESPEC." ;)

      --
      My 0.02 cents
  3. Re:I've got it by Terminal+Saint · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, like giving it to me so I can spend it on hardware that will be outdated in 6 months.

    --
    It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
  4. Re:GFs Pussy by sokoban · · Score: 5, Funny

    If the smell is really strong it is probably some sort of infection which is causing there to be high levels of trimethylamine oxide which cause a fishy odor. Get her on a regimen of Flagyl to treat the infection.

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
  5. Re:I've got it by ArAgost · · Score: 3, Funny

    I just wanted to build up the most awesome gaming computer possible that will never see anything more complicated than solitaire. Now try to run Vista's solitaire. I bet your FPS will be soooooo low.
  6. But does it come with ECC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can't find registered ECC DDR2 faster than 667 MHz. Why?
    I was hoping my next machine would be a quad core with 800 MHz DDR2 and ECC.
    Much as my current machine is PC3200 DDR with registered ECC. No sense throttling down the relative bandwidth per core.

    [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.]

    1. Re:But does it come with ECC? by DaleGlass · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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".

    2. Re:But does it come with ECC? by amorsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      [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.

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  7. Re:I've got it by NeilTheStupidHead · · Score: 4, Funny

    the computer wouldn't even post until I used the big thick power cable that came with the power supply.

    Also commonly known as plugging it in :P
    --
    Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
  8. Memory speed is how relevant to system operation? by Glowing+Fish · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
  9. pointless by starman97 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The basic structure of Dynamic RAM has not changed, it still takes about 50nS for row precharge (Tras
    and 20bS column reads. All they've done is speed up the interface logic. The memory cell access is no faster.
    OK, so once you've opened a row, you can read that faster, but how many operating systems are
    optimized to keep the data row aligned in the system memory? You have a data request that is outside
    of the row you've opened, you have to close that row and open another, 120nS penalty.
    At 1.0GHz, that's 120 clock cycles.

    --
    Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
  10. That's processors have caches (lots of) by vlad_petric · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --

    The Raven

    1. Re:That's processors have caches (lots of) by Anpheus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Because there are two ways to beat the latency problem. One is to get the information closer to the chip (cache) and the other is to allow the chip to do something else, or several something elses at the same time (multiple cores, multiple execution units of various kinds, etc.) If you haven't noticed, the latest Intel chips sport ridiculously large caches (they're up to 12-16MiB now) and have 4 cores.

      So... they're still using a lot of real estate for cache.

    2. Re:That's processors have caches (lots of) by timeOday · · Score: 2, Funny

      I associate oversized caches with Intel's "Extreme" line of processors, which (for some reason) offered virtually no performance boost.

    3. Re:That's processors have caches (lots of) by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Informative

      The Itaniums are up to 24MB, but the x86 quad cores are "only" up to 8MB total. The next generation Core processors will probably go up to 16.

  11. This is a fan and a heatsink by Animats · · Score: 4, Funny

    This isn't a new DRAM chip. This is an ad from the fan and heatsink crowd.

  12. Re:Memory speed is how relevant to system operatio by zippthorne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, he's saying that more memory is better than fast memory. He might not need 8GB, but it's likely that 8GB of RAM would improve system performance better than doubling the speed of the ram.

    The whole assumption is that anyone needing that much performance will be butting up against disk read bottlenecks due to swap anyway.

    My question to programmers is this, Swap may have made sense 30 years ago, when ram was like $8/byte and not much faster than disk anyway, but in 2007, ram is ubiquitous and MUCH faster than disk. Why do we even have swap anymore at all?

    --
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  13. another active cooler. w00t. by yeremein · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yet another whiny fan to sieze up and die in six months.

    How long before they put active heatsinks on mice?

  14. Re:GFs Pussy by Proofof.+Chaos · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's probably dirty. To clean it, deflate her and wash with warm soapy water, then hang up to air dry.

  15. DDR2 by rubberchickenboy · · Score: 2, Funny

    High Performance DDR2

    There's a High Performance Dance Dance Revolution 2?

  16. That would never work... by Proofof.+Chaos · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...it makes it to easy for cats to catch them.

  17. Re:Memory speed is how relevant to system operatio by DaleGlass · · Score: 2, Informative
    That's just the Linux kernel having a stupid behavior by default.

    By default, it lets processes overcommit memory. That means you can malloc more than there actually is. This is done with the expectation that programs allocate extra memory they don't actually use. Problem is that an excessive allocation succeeds, but then the system can't satisfy it, so it has to kill some random process.

    Do this:

    # echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
    This will turn off overcommit completely. When some program tries to request too much, malloc simply fails. No random processes get killed. The program that tired to allocate the memory is given a chance to handle the failure, unlike what happens with the default setting.
  18. Memory has gotten ridiculous by billcopc · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com