Would you buy a M/B with built in RAM?

[MadRat]

Would you buy a motherboard with a built-in 16mb memory module? I'd think so, especially if the memory was faster than the RAM that went into its expansion slots.

Imagine 16mb of RAM in two scenarioes:

1. System RAM is inferior to integrated RAM

a. Setup of your O/S could be done w/o extra memory
b. Integrated video would love the extra bandwidth
c. Integrated RAM acts as L3 cache when RAM is loaded

2. System RAM is superior to integratedRAM

a. Setup of your O/S could be done w/o extra memory
b. Integrated RAM becomes buffer to expansion slots when they are loaded

While #2 isn't near as exciting as #1 it is still much better than the current setups. The integrated RAM would be a good buffer when the expansion slots are loaded with RAM. The extra buffer would still be over 100x faster than a hard drive.

 

[BurntKooshie]

Ever hear of Micron's chipsets? They have 'em, with 8Mb of embedded ram....not that they're actually going to produce it for the masses, but it exists.

 

[HansXP]

I don't think you can install W2K with only 16 MB of RAM. And even if you could install whatever OS you're using without additional RAM, why would you want to? Even 9x crawls with 16 megs of RAM. So to answer your question, no, I would not..that would add cost and serve no useful purpose.

 

[zzzz]

not RAM but if the bios chip contains DOS and if there is an option of booting to DOS, that should be handy. Would be better than floppy. And if we could store some small files on it, that would be useful for flashing the bios..

 

[MadRat]

We'll see FlashRAM probably unseat floppies as the backup storage of choice someday. (They can cram alot of memory into a Sony memory stick.) However, this RAM is not good for using everyday to read/write as it has a limited number of uses. I'm talking more about using built in DDR or SRAM like that used in today's tiny videocards.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Not a snowball's chance in Hell of me buying a mobo with integrated RAM as the sole system memory.