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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (4350)	12/17/1998 8:34:00 PM
From: Sean W. Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Clarence and All, Miscelleanous Notes: 1. SDSMark doesn't seem return phone calls or email. Had problems with their online order system. Ended up ordering the Global Iwin HD Coolers from Computer Nerds. computernerds.com They sell it under a different name for $39.95 in white and black. dirtcheapdrives.com sells them but they are $49.95 2. Having problems getting Boot Magic to install off the electronic distribution. Called PQ and paid them $6.95 for shipping and their sending me the Retail Edition. The online edition although convient on has help files and no Full Printable Docs available. I have worked around the problem and am going to be able to install BM from DOS here in a few minutes. 3. Installation from the G200 under NT still sucks. Had the same problems on this machine even when installing from a clean NT install. They need to fix this. Took me an hour to get the driver to load and still I was only successful loading 3.63. 3.68 would not load... 4. NT4.0 SP4 and PM 4.0 have some problems. MS changed the API slightly and PM will report errors on existing NTFS Paritions that are not there. TS advised they are working on a patch. I didn't have time to query him on the consequences of this. Be forewarned. 5. On the ECC/Parity PC 100 Dimm Issue. After several conversations with our local memory gurus... No specific knowledge on the existance on compatibility of the Parity vs. ECC Dimms, general consensus is that they would be different unless the dimm had a PAL/GAL on board. One fella was very interested in the prospect of Parity SDRAM Dimms that are byte addressable. My previous statement about the degradation in performance of ECC is not correct. I was thinking in terms of Double Word Accesses only. There is a potentially large performance penality when doing any size access less than 64 Bits to an ECC Dimm. This occurs because the Syndrome (8 bits) for the 64 Bit double word is computed across the whole double word. When a byte write etc occurs, a Read/Modify/Write must occur. 64 bits is read. Then 1 byte is modified. The syndrome is re-computed and then the entire double word + syndrome is written back to memory. Therefore if you did 100% byte writes your performance would be half of equivalent parity implimentation because you have to do a read for every write in order to correctly update the error correction code (syndrome). If you consider a distribution 50%Writes 50% reads and all byte accesses your still looking at 25% degradation. In reality with L2 caches, the fact that reads usually outnumber writes results in a minimal performance degradation which was originally expressed by ZP and is correct for typical PC applications. Anyone having URL to Parity PC100 Dimms please post the URL's. If they are byte addressable these may be desirable for some projects we are considering. Almost ready to start installing all my Apps... Sean