[GTALUG] war story: buying RAM

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| On Tue, May 09, 2023 at 03:33:17PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

| > When I got it, I could install it in my machine but I could not reassemble 
| > the machine.  I needed "low profile" DIMMs.  Not mentioned in the manual.
| 
| Strange.  Checking M75s (both SFF and Gen 2) on crucial.com doesn't
| mention anything about needing low profile and their compatiblity list
| is usually very accurate (often more accurate than the manual the system
| came with).

This is an M75s gen 2 SFF unit.
I installed the DIMMs and then could not replace the tray with 2.5"
and 3.5" bays.  It bottomed out on the DIMMs.

I suspect that the DIMMs themselves would fit but their flamboyant
heat spreaders would not.  The heat spreaders had stickers saying "warranty
void if removed" so I didn't want to try.  I have no idea how
important heat spreaders are for RAM.

Speaking of which, the NVMe drives I buy come without heat sinks.  Are
they important?  My guess: perhaps for NVMe gen 4 because they seem to
take considerably more power.

If heatsinks are needed, why don't they come with the drives?  Are
they supposed to come with the motherboard?

In the case of the M75s, the NVe mounting kit that I cannot get from
Lenovo does include a heat sink.
<https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/p/accessories-and-software/thinkcentre-and-thinkstation/thinkcentre-and-thinkstation-hard-drives/4xf1c39743>

There is no such heat sink in the M75q.

| > I think I paid roughly the same for 64MiB of RAM for my first PC clone in 
| > the mid 1990's.
| 
| I remember 4x32MB EDO Dimms were about $900 in early 1997.

I may well be misremembering the number.  Perhaps it was $200 for each
of the two 32MiB SDRAM DIMMs.  Or even some other price.  It was
probably early fall in 1997, but I'm not sure.  (It was before Win 98
was released.)

I do remember 64M being extravagant at the time.  I bought it with two
32MiB SDRAM DIMMs I think the motherboard was an Asus TX97.  That used
an Intel TX chipset.  The TX had a limitation that it could not cache
more than 64M of physical memory.  The CPU was an AMD K6 200 or 233.

It was a while before I switched over to the K6/Linux box from the
SPARCClassic.  Solaris was still better than Linux and the
Sun's display was better.  The PC's CPU was a lot faster -- 200MHz vs
32Mhz.

At that time, "workstations" were still a higher tier than PCs.  PC
stores didn't understand workstation users.  But there was almost no
remaining technical reason so this disappeared fairly quickly.  Linux
was one of the factors. It is hard to remember how bad the PC display
situation was compared with workstations.