Here’s a motherboard Intel very quickly wanted to forget about.
It’s the Intel CC820—or Cape Cod—desktop board, a product that was late to market (not unusual) and within a few months, the subject of a recall (quite unusual). As the CC820 designation suggests, the board was built on the ill-fated Intel 820 ‘Camino’ chipset.
Fascinating story.
Ouch. Intel was in a position where they thought not that they couldn’t do any wrong, but that it wouldn’t matter if they did.
Rambus did fare much better when paired with a Pentium 4, though. The article mentioned that it was unstable with more than two slots on a channel populated, and that might’ve been a weakness with RDRAM itself. Does anybody know if the Pentium 4 chipsets that used RDRAM had that problem?
Nobody knows if > 2 populated slots of RDRAM works because nobody has actually seen RDRAM in real life 😉
I remember the 440 chipset very well. At that time it was really the thing to get. For about 2 years the Intel world was great and then the GigaHertz race with AMD really started, Intel really wanted to push Rambus memory for some reason and although you sometimes heard good things in reviews/benchmarks it was always something like “10% more performance for 3 times the price”. Then Intel couldn’t get the P4 to perform and started it’s Itanium foolery and AMD basically took over. Memory prices also greatly dropped and Rambus basically turned into a patent troll. AMD got the consumer 64bit rolling and Intel was in big trouble not knowing what to do next.
And then Intel basically gave up on the “P4 will get us to 10 GHz” and on Itanium and restarted very succesfully with their Core-cpu’s while AMD got stuck with their Athlons and Intel quickly took over the entire market for a very long time.
Now the tide seems to be turning yet again, so let’s see what happens next
(incredibly summarized Intel/AMD history, so absolutely not 100% accurate!)
“Nobody knows if > 2 populated slots of RDRAM works because nobody has actually seen RDRAM in real life ”
Thats a lie!
I once stumbled over one while disassembling an old PC.
But it could have been the only one in existence 😉
Huh!!!!???? Say what? Nobody….
For years, I ran my Win98se gamer on an Intel VC820 motherboard, first with 1 stick of PC800 Ram and then with two stick’s of PC800 Ram. Both from samsung and both with the size of 128 each. The CPU was a Pentium3-500 and the graphics card was different ones. (Matrox G400-Max, TNT2-Ultra, Voodoo3-3500). As far as I can understand from reading up on Vogons. Then Pentium4 is kind of the one that struggles with RD-Ram and not Pentium-3. The 820 chipset was kind of rock solid, yet it was slower than the 440BX when running the same processor.
You didn’t read the article, did you?
1) It specifically mentions that the VC820 is a “2 sticks limited” version of the 820 chipset because of reliability issues with > 2 sticks of RDRAM.
2) It also mentions that an SDRAM to RDRAM memory translator was added because the RDRAM was too expensive. This made performance < 440BX while the price was higher.
Your setup is roughly the only stable one and was very expensive and barely more performant than one with the 440BX. RDRAM simply didn't have benefits over SDRAM for a P3. For a P4 RDRAM finally gave some benefits and the price had gone down but at that time AMD was already outperforming Intel and RAMBUS was basically considered the enemy of the people. Buying one stick and later adding another one was also impossible for quite a while.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1097&page=1
Wel… You spoke about chipsets in general, and I replied about the Intel 820 chipset that I had on my VC820 board.
No… I did not read the article through, and only skimmed through it. I was more interested in the CC820 board and how the layout was, as I have had one. And why would I ever read the article through in dept for reading about the 820 chipset? I actually bought the VC820 board in 2014, and sold it again in 2017 as part of a complete Pentium3-500 machine. I used it to compare it against my Intel d815-eea board and the Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard that I had. I ran lots of benchmarks, and tried lots of different AGP cards on those machines and tested them with games on Win98se as well. So… Nope… Did not read the article, as I know how they feel, when you use them as an end user and how they perform.
Let’s just say, that it does not matter if you have 440bx, 820 or 815 chipsets, as you will not notice in early era Win98 games.
A friend of mine had an RDRAM rig, apparently they got hot enough that they’d burn you if you touched em….. I imagine he was OCing them which caused that and the CPU also.
cb88,
I never had an RDRAM rig myself, but apparently it was normal for them to run really hot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAM
Yup…. That is why Samsung used heatsinks on their PC-800 RD-Ram’s. 😀
I really wanted a 440BX, I made several computers for my siblings with it in there, but couldn’t afford it for myself. the 820 just seemed stupid. I agree with everyone else here, it was the first dumb thing intel had done in my computing lifetime that I was aware of ( I didn’t know about the silly i860 until much later)
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I have to disagree with you there, RDRAM brought lots of benefits to the 820…
Just kidding 🙂 I often go for a contrarian viewpoint, but everything about RDRAM seemed bad.
As an aside, it bugs me when people who don’t appreciate the tech very much can nevertheless afford better things, haha.
Nah, they couldn’t afford computers, they were going to college gifts. What I meant was I couldn’t justify an upgrade from my pentium 266 rig for myself. Which sounds terrible, but it was a beast of a 266 with expensive purpose built hardware that would need to be repurchased with a new system.
Price/performance, then yes. If you were an end user, and played Unreal Tournament at 800×600 back in 1999, then you would really not notice if it was 440bx or 820 that were the chipset in the machine. I did some intense tests back in 2015 to 2017, both on performance and on the actual gaming experience. I tested 440bx, 820 and 815 chipsets against each other, running with different GFX cards. And the verdict is, that if you sat back in 1999, and had a Vodoo3-3500 card or an Matrox G400-MAX, then you would actually only feel a difference when swapping the GFX card.
In other words, if you only used your computer for benchmarkings, then yes, it really does matter if you had 440 or 820 chipsets. Yet, honestly, who uses ones computer for benchmarkings exclusively? It is true that the 820 chipset was not perfect, yet it works and it works extremely well. And I actually managed to crash the 440bx chipset once, when I tried to install the drivers in Win98se. Yet the 820 based board that I had, was just rock solid. I was unable to crash it at any point.
It is like the same with the Gigabyte GA-5AX and Asus P5A boards. Both Socket Super 7. The P5A is faster, yet the GA-5AX have stability going for it. I used to run Win98se for days on end, on the GA-5AX board, back in 2000. It never crashed on me. Yet my friends had Pentium3 class hardware, and they had unstable machines. Personally, I will take stability over speed at any time.