rambus or not?

I am new to the rambus ram myself. My company recently purchased 5 workstations from dell that contain rdram. So far, no problems. The bus speed on rdram is much faster. When you purchase sdram now, you are typically buying pc133 now. With the new ddr sdram out, you can double that bus speed. We just upgraded one of our machines and the current bus speed of rdram is pc800. As for mixing the two, you cannot. The bus architecture of an rdram motherboard is different to handle the higher speed of rdram. There are a few other matters pertaining to rdram that might make you want to wait a bit before jumping into a new P-4 right now. Cost is one of them although it has come down significantly but issues such as heat, error checking and such...ifthis is for home, stick with a 1 GB chip for now and wait a few months...
Good luck!

Mike

Mixing will not work. RDRAM and SDRAM are two different standards. A third standard is DDR RAM which is becoming more popular. NVIDIA the popular video chip company is coming up with a chip set for the AMD Athlon CPU that is built around this memory architecture. If the results are just half of what they claim they will leave Intel in the dust unless Intel decides to change their stance. When Intel comes to its senses RDRAM may not be long for this world. So I personally would stay away from it. Good luck.

for an in-depth review on the differences between rdram and sdram, go to www.tom'shardware.com. great site.
in a nutshell, rambus (rdram) is more expensive, has a higher bandwidth but slower access times, and costs roughly twice as much as sdram.your choice of memory types depends more on the choice of cpu.
if you get a p3 or celeron, go with pc-133 sdram.
if you want a p4, go with pc-800 rdram.
if you get a duron or athlon, go pc-266 ddr ram.
hope this helps.
good luck.

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