CJE RAM special offer not so special

By Chris Williams. Published: 23rd Jun 2005, 20:40:19 | Permalink | Printable

Heywadedaminute

CJE Micros were quick to launch a "special offer" on 64M and 128M RAM for RiscPCs and similar old kit following the release of Firefox for RISC OS. The browser, ported from the Unix environment, is fairly memory hungry and will happily gobble 64M or more of RAM whilst surfing the 'net, and this is therefore an ideal time to upgrade.

Until the end of July, CJE will donate a fiver to the Unix Porting Project for each RAM stick they sell: 40 quid for 64M of EDO RAM and 60 quid for 128M EDO RAM, including VAT and shipping if you quote "Firefox offer" when you order.

Compare these prices to Liquid Silicon, who charge 22.50 quid for 64M EDO and 45 quid for 128M EDO. Similarly, APDL do 64M EDO for 22 quid and 128M EDO for 48 quid. All prices include VAT and carriage. These prices are unchanged, regardless of which web browser is the flavour of the month, leaving you with more cash to donate to Peter or buy cold drinks with.

One dealer also pointed out that he'd seen second hand SIMMs of 64M EDO going for over 30 quid on ebay.

Don't forget that early RiscPCs prefer Fast Page Memory (FPM) to EDO, but otherwise EDO is fine for RiscPCs, A7000+s, RiscStations and Micos. CJE also sponsored the effort to bring Firefox to RISC OS.

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Discussion

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Chris - are you including P&P /VAT in your prices as CJE have included them?

AW on 23/6/05 9:31PM
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Er, yes Chris is. You might notice he says:

"Compare these prices to Liquid Silicon, who charge 22.50 quid for 64M EDO and 45 quid for 128M EDO. Similarly, APDL do 64M EDO for 22 quid and 128M EDO for 48 quid. All prices include VAT and carriage"

The important phrase being "All prices include VAT and carriage" :-)

j5m1th on 23/6/05 9:40PM
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I'll just mention that prices are going up as SIMMs become scarcer. I was doing 64MBs for £19.95 until just before Wakefield. The prices above are for what I've got in stock and may go up (or down even) shortly.

liquid on 23/6/05 10:14PM
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Certainly, from the big dealers (Crucial, Kingston, Dabs, WoC, etc) the largest you seem to be able to get is 32MB.

nunfetishist on 23/6/05 11:10PM
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I bought two 64MB EDO SIMMs off eBay last year for £3.50 each. Both work and MemTest just fine in my RISC PC.

Another RISC OS hardware rip off?

Trapper on 23/6/05 11:29PM
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Iconbar says that FRM came later than EDO. Confused

AW on 24/6/05 12:38AM
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It's interesting to compare the drobe response to the CJE offer with the Icon Bar's ( [link] ). It's enough to drive you to relativism...

Nonetheless, it's good to see a RISC OS company doing a bit of proactive marketing whilst supporting other areas of the market.

flypig on 24/6/05 12:48AM
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Trapper: So, you compare new prices with stuff you can get second hand at ebay, possibly being sold by someone who doesn't want to do more than get them off their hands?

SimonC on 24/6/05 1:28AM
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True its a risk, eBay always is. Quality RISC OS gear always has been expensive, frankly too expensive for my budget. eBay is only affordable way that I have to buy kit.

Everyone knows the older the memory the more expensive it becomes. Espcially with EDO being as ancient as it is. From my perspective though, I could buy 128MB for my RISC PC for £60, or has I have recently buy 1GB of PC3200 for my PC at just over £70.

Still I love the platform, and get berated quite often by my geekier friends for worshipping what they consider an old, archaic religion

Trapper on 24/6/05 4:39AM
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Let's see the facts: many people still use RiscPCs. Also, SIMMs are disappearing form market. So, following ideas from a thread on csa., could a developer (STD springs to mind, but others may do that) make a card that plugs onto the copro socket of RiscPC and have control logic/sockets for modern types of memories? A bit like a stripped-down version of a kinetic (no SA, only memory)? It seems technically feasible to me. Whether it is economically viable, that's up to developers/buyers.

bernie on 24/6/05 9:55AM
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The comparisons are rather selective, we are the cheapist by far on 128MB FPM! Occasionally we do get 'end of line' bargain prices but often in only very small quantities, regular supplies don't come cheap :-(

All our simms will fit any motherboard, and all the prices are lower than before, see our web site! The site should be updated later today with the special offer prices, but I'm off on my hols now, but only for a week as us poor RISC OS dealers can't afford any more :-(

chrisevans on 24/6/05 10:13AM
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If anyone cares to buy 64 or 128Mb SIMMs from APDL and pay the "CJE offer" price I'll give 12 ukp each to the UPP.

BTW the reason I don't bother with FP is that experience has shown that modern EDO is actually *more* compatible with older RPCs than FP. The most likely cause of problems is mixing EDO and FP in the same machine, and EDO is now so cheap you might as well throw away that old 16Mb when you add more RAM, it's really not worth keeping.

apdl on 24/6/05 10:30AM
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Nice to see all the negativety and general back stabbing going on here. CJE were the ones to come up with the idea of UPP support with their offer and were also the only ones to send us a press release at the iconbar.com. Its only /after/ that that everyone else says 'oh, we can do that too'

fwibbler on 24/6/05 11:11AM
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I upgraded my RAM stack a few years ago, how can I tell from the desktop exactly how much and what type I inserted?

petermcc on 24/6/05 11:25AM
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fwibbler: Who's backstabbing? We're just trying to join in the support for the UPP and make a better offer. Or don't you think think that the UPP (and other RISC OS users) should get a decent deal?

If you (and others here) really think it's wrong to offer VFM then that's OK by me, but I'll have to put 40 GBP on the price of Schema2 (and similar amounts on some other software) to make sure I don't sell it cheaper than anyone else.

apdl on 24/6/05 11:30AM
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petermcc:

If you keep an eye on the screen as it boots you'll see how much RAM + VRAM although I seem to remeber there was an issue with this and viewfinder...

ROHC on 24/6/05 1:28PM
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I got 128Mb simms, but my RiscPc recognize it as 64

nodoubt73 on 24/6/05 2:47PM
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bernie: I've missed that thread (I've not been using the Internet for the past few days).

Has anyone looked at [link] - I don't know what the difference is between the 7500FE's DRAM interface and that of the RiscPC...

tribbles2 on 24/6/05 4:41PM
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Assuming it works in FPM as well as EDO mode, that should work in a Risc PC.

caliston2 on 24/6/05 4:57PM
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tribbles2: Thanks for infos. Thread was in csa.hardware, "dual ARM processors" and make me think if something could use the 2nd processor slot, as a HW FPU unit, RAM expansion, and so on. The link seem promising, although I don't understand if this device exists physically or it's only a proof of concept. Pricing infos are missing also.

bernie on 24/6/05 5:53PM
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nodoubt73:

Yes, that was frequently the case with certain types of EDO RAM. I have such a SIMM in my RiscPC and it works just fine (albeit at half the quoted size). If I recall correctly the important thing to watch out for is that there are only chips on one side of the module - if there are chips on both sides, only halve the memory is recognized by the RiscPC.

wuerthne on 24/6/05 6:14PM
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wuerthne: Actually that isn't the case. It's got nothing to do with whether the chips are on one or both sides (a lot of 16Mb and most 32Mb SIMMs have chips on both sides) but whether they are wired in the correct type of array.

apdl on 24/6/05 6:30PM
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Both of mine have chips on either side, and are recognised correctly. Perhaps this was a rumour started by Acorn so you'd only buy their upgrades?

Trapper on 24/6/05 11:48PM
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The chips on one side thing has got something to do with the clearance when you insert the simm in the slot. Buy from an Acorn dealer and you'll get ram that'll fit. I got mine from Liquid Silicon. Alan is very fair and helpful. Worth considering if you have problems with timing, etc -- Spriteman

Spriteman on 25/6/05 4:32PM
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Spriteman: This was because the series 1 and most series 2 RPC 600 motherboards had RAM sockets which had a rather high back. Subsequently most PCs had lower sockets which enabled the chips on the back of a SIMM to be much closer to the edge of the board so the whole assembly could be much lower profile. However, this meant that SIMMs with chips on the back as well as the front and where the chips were very close to the edge wouldn't fit in the early RPC socket.

The vast majority of these were 32Mb, which are almost always double sided. Hence when 32Mb was the most common RAM upgrade for RPCs there was a problem in this area. Almost all 64Mb SIMMs have chips only on the front so the problem doesn't arise.

apdl on 26/6/05 6:38AM
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