Today I bought a 256MB card from Circuit City and it seems to work. However, I wanted to verify that it could work with the entire stick without a hitch, so I downloaded GoldMemory (A wonderful RAM testing program from www.goldmemory.cz) and loaded 'er up on the ol' I-Opener. The first thing I noticed was that it was EXTREMELY slow. It took several minutes to go from 0 to 1%. I looked at the transfer rate and it said 28MB/s. I've used this program a few times before, and on an old P90 with 72pin SIMMs, I was getting 68MB/s (if I remember correctly, either way, it was CERTAINLY more than 28!). I ran the same test on my Intel P150MMX laptop with PC66 SODIMM's and get 88MB/s. Now this bugs me, the I-Opener's bus is running at 100Mhz, correct? Yet, it's not even half the speed ?! I popped the original 32MB chip in, thinking there might be a caching problem (some old-cheap chipsets could only cache 64MB, so anything over 64MB would make the system SLOWER) and it went up to 38MB/s... still under half the speed. What gives?! Has anyone else noticed that the RAM is slow? Someone did a bunch of benchmarks, and the AMD 166 was clearly faster than the chip this comes with, but I thought that was for processing of information, not communication with the RAM...
I saw some AMD K6-II 500Mhz chips on www.pricewatch.com for $30... maybe I'll just get one of these. Of course, I also need to get all the parts, and speed isn't really a necessity for my plans...
Eric | |
