Need forum wisdom!

[ooartist]

I recently bought a new Mac G4 800mhz (trashed win-tel) and replaced the 256mb stick that came in it with (ram I use is Crucial only) 2 256mb CL2 sticks and 1 512mb CL3 (which I thought was CL2, arrrg). My question is do you think that I should replace the 512 stick with just another 256mb CL2 stick to keep my memory at CL2 because you know the 512mb stick causes all of the memory to run at CL3 or do you think performance gain is just minimal? Keep in mind that I am a hardcore performance freak and I believe that you should never compromise! (I know I should have bought the faster chips but I had to save some of my money for new software like PS and my wife wanted Office X).

BTW, Any recommendations for a fast I/O subsystem (i.e. RAID controllers, SCSI controllers, or just a really fast ATA controller)?

You guys make having a Mac fun!

Mac-head forever,

ooartist

 

[irmongoose]

help is on the way




irmongoose

 

[Hemingray]

The latency gain between CL2 and CL3 is very minimal. You most likely won't notice a difference. In this case, more RAM is definitely more valuable than less ram at a lower latency. In my opinion.

 

[AlphaTech]

I have seen different CL level memory cause issues with applications and memory holes. You might not encounter this, since I do not know what you are going to be running on the G4 system it is hard to tell if you will encounter any issues.

In my case, I used all CL2 (222) memory in my G4 tower and never had an issue from that. My laptop also has all CL2 (222) memory, runs OS X 99.5% of the time and has had only one kernel panic (due to putting PC133 memory in the lower slot).

I would try it for at least a little while and then decide if you want to go ahead and change the memory to all CL2. If you are concerned about something happening at the worse possible time, then return the CL3 memory and get a CL2 stick in it's place.

 

[buffsldr]

More ram will help more than the latency.

 

[Rower_CPU]

As far as I had heard CAS latency was only crucial if you were overclocking your front side bus.

More memory will definitely be more usefull, like buffsldr said.

One of the key bottlenecks in system performance is HD performance. Since you asked about RAID, here's my 2 cents:

According to most people these days, RAID 0 striping is great for writes, but actually slows reads down, so it depends on what you'll be doing.

SCSI drives are the fastest there is, but they're expensive and noisy.

Fast ATA drives (ATA 133) are starting to come close to SCSI performance and they won't cost an arm and a leg, although I've heard from other techs that they trash more easily than SCSI.

It depends on what fits your wallet and needs.

 

[Beej]

As long as the stick of RAM works, keep it. There's no use in replacing it with a smaller stick, even if the smaller stick is a bit better quality.

If, however, you do decide to replace the 512 stick, you're more than welcome to send the old 512 stick to me. You know, cuz you won't need it any more? C'mon, please?

 

[AlphaTech]

From what I have read, and experienced, RAID O is best for performance, RAID 1 (mirroring) is best for data integrity (you don't loose everything if one drive fails). There are other levels, and some can be combined. Most desktop solutions are either RAID 0, 1 or 0/1.

I have a RAID 0 setup within the game peecee, with a pair of 40GB drives. They perform very nicely (both 7200 rpm, ATA100) since the spec's are doubled. For gaming, that is about all you need... if you want to make sure that you don't loose any data, even if a drive fails, then go with the stripping with parity/mirroring. That way even if one drive dies, you don't loose your stuff.