Substitute for Rambus...

[AliOop]

I have a family PC running Windows XP Home. It's a model 'Gateway Performance 1300' and is about 5 years old. It came with 128mg of ram. At that time, the ram was more than enough for what we did with it. That is not the case now. I'd like to bump it up to 512, maybe 1gig of ram. Its a nice machine and it's only short comings is the lack of ram. Curently the ram it has is two sticks PC800 Rambus for a total of 128mgs. Looking at upgrading the ram I had to gasp at the prices of Rambus. Is it possible to subsitute DDR ram for the Rambus? If possible how do I find out what kind I can use?

Before anyone flames me for trying to use DDR ram instead of Rambus, I'm well aware of the superiority of Rambus. No doubt it's better. All the specs I've read bare it out. But I can see why it failed. It cost too damn much! And for the everyday use my family puts it through, DDR will do just fine.

Thanks.

[user1238]

Perhaps some1 besides me will find this for a historical perspective :-) RDRAM is not interchangeable with other RAM due to physical and electrical differences. the keyways are different. it was also slower than the cheaper DDR PC2100. RDRAM PC-800 had slower latency and only 1600 MB/s bandwidth (16-bit single-channel in Gateway 1300).
IMO P4 platform was crap before hyper-threading and dual-channel DDR. the Willamette was actually slower than notebooks with P3m and PC133. This i am stating based on years of playing with productivity benchmarks. P3m Tualatin with PC133 was practically equivalent to P4 Northwood <= 2 GHz with PC2100, mostly because P3m Tualatins had 512 KB L2 cache (more than Willamette) and better internal architecture. Naturally P4 Northwood-era notebooks had newer videocards and thus are generally better for gaming purposes.
BTW Intel 845 mainboards were also available for use with PC133 SDRAM, theoretical bandwith of which is 1064 MB/s (vs. 1600 for RDRAM). slower throughput though better latency - no real noticeable difference as the Netburst marchitecture (malarchitecture?) was the real bottleneck.