My guess is that this is Dell's decision to only sell the board with slower
SDRAM, perhaps because they have commited themselves to following intel's
lead down the RAMBUS path.  I don't know which mb Dell is using, but the
i815e supports PC133 SDRAM, including CAS2.  It is limited to only
supporting 512mb of SDRAM, and this probably does reflect an effort on
intel's part to keep this chipset aimed at the personal computer market and
not have it infringe on the server market.

I have heard about some complaints about some memory modules not working
well with the 815e, but these complaints seem to be sporadic and without a
clear pattern as to which memory is best or which memory to avoid.

For what it is worth, I'm using a mix of Memory Man memory at this time.
One PC 100 CAS2 and one PC133 CAS2 module (@128mb).  I had no problem
running them both at CAS2 with a 100mhz bus, and I have been running both at
133mhz with the CAS and other memory timings turned back to 3.  This is with
an overclocked processor as well.

The only glitches I've noticed so far are that the memory probe built into
the PIII is being misread by the BIOS and the accompanying monitoring
software.  It seems like a they are using the wrong correcting factor to
correctly zero in the scale.  And, my Aureal based sound card seems to think
that it is on a secondary PCI bus, so it won't install DOS support, the
joystick port, or the MPU-401 external midi port.  There seems to be a work
around for this problem however, and I'm sure it won't be an issue with a
system bought from an OEM.

Benchmarks suggest that I'm getting very good performance out of the memory
system.  If you find these worthwhile or meaningful, I'm getting the
following with Sandra using a 933mhz PIII and just the PC133 memory module
running at CAS2: ALU memory bandwidth 407mb/sec and FPU memory bandwidth
478mb/sec.

I noticed that you referenced AnandTech's site; you might want to browse
their motherboard forum and see what folks are saying about this new
product.

John

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