Is RAM user upgradeable in the Series 3?

I seem to recall that it cannot be upgraded. I have nothing to base that on except my feeble memory, however.

 

Pardon my ingorance...

Why would one need to upgrade the RAM on the S3?

Does the HD come with more RAM? Why?

What purpose would more RAM serve?

Educate me...

Thanks,

Mark

 

I have an S3 now but added a Tivo Cache Card to my S1 with 512mb SDRAM. The UI was noticeably faster, and I was upset when I found out that there was no simple upgrade option for the S3. My S1 with 512mb was faster than my S3.

 

Yes, it is disappointing that the S3 is slower than the S1.

 

Yet, from what I have read..... Even with more RAM the HD is slower than the S3..

Go figure...

 

About 10-15 years ago I was at a presentation that included a 300MB SQL Server database running on a Compaq with 1GB of memory. It was pretty fast because the entire databse was in memory. Having the entire Tivo database in memory would also likely be very fast, assuming the software is at all efficient.

 

actually I have seen that just in the cnet review but not elsewhere. Two factors at work here
- the THD is on 8.1 code base and does not have the 8.3 the S3 does which sped up menus.
- boxes and reviewers are inconsistent - we have reports of DT boxes that are slow yet in general they are pretty snappy. if a reviewer is comparing to a DT (which is not dealing with extra attributes of HD in menu display and serarches) or to nothing but their expectations then they might say that.

it might be one of the few things they could find fault with - menus did not come up right away

 

Never tried a Raptor but moved to 7200's on the S2 with minimal impact, nice big caches on the later drives I tried appeared to improve the UI a little, but the updates to the ToDo list, etc, didn't seem to be improved any and the HMO menu always seems to be a dog.

 

vstone, that was the point of the cache cards in the S1. I was disappointed long ago to learn I couldn't do the same mod to my original S2, but any of these newer models are fairly un-modable compared to the S1 (aside from increased storage).

 

You do realize that surface-mount soldering is several orders of magnitude more difficult than normal soldering (and can require special tools)?

 

Actually, not really. The TiVo HD has 256MB of main RAM, the S3 has 128MB of shared RAM, true. HOWEVER, the HD has one unified SoC that uses that 256MB. The S3 had the main SoC that used th3 128MB and the separate decoder that had its own dedicated RAM bank.

What the TiVo HD has done is just unify the two chips into one and unify the RAM into one bank.

6 of one, half dozen of the other.

 

So, which is better for a hi-def TiVo??? The dedicated smaller RAMs of the the S3 or the larger shared RAM of the HD??

I know in the PC arena, I always try to stay away from laptops/desktops that "Share" RAM between system and video. I always look for PCs with separate video cards that contain their own processors and memory.

Maybe separate RAM banks puts a checkmark on the S3 side of the ledger.

 

Has the memory interface changed from the S3? ie. does it run at a faster clock rate or is the bus wider, etal.?

Has the MPU's cache changed in size?

 

I too am wondering the same thing as mchiles. Anyone know what is "better"...?

Thanks

 

The larger shared RAM should be better, as it can be dynamically allocated wherever it's needed. However, the HD is still on 8.1, so you can't really compare them yet. I very much doubt it makes a difference on dedicated hardware like a TiVo anyway.