It's a minefield out there, with so many different brands of performance memory to choose from. The first installment of OcPrices memory shootouts, the one for PC2700 was our biggest ever review. Times change however, and with a multitude of boards officially supporting the PC3200 standard based on both VIA (KT400 and P4X400 chipsets) and SiS (648 chipset) motherboards it's important to get a brand that does what it is supposed to! We have assembled a round-up of no less than eight memory sticks from six different manufacturers. One thing to remember that PC3200 and PC3500 are still not recognised JEDEC standards, so memory manufacturers can put pretty much any old sticks under their fancy heat spreaders and call it PC3200. This review is here to sort out the pretenders from the good guys.
First up I'd like to thank our sponsors PC-Memory-Upgrade and Shop4memory for providing us with the samples necessary for this review to take place. All sticks are direct from the retail market except for the Corsair which was provided by Corsair themselves. The brands we have up for scrutiny today are Corsair, GeIL, Mushkin, OCZ, Performance Memory and Samsung. I plan on updating this review as more sticks become available, and it would be nice to include some XtremeDDR and Kingston in this review (hint hint guys!).
As before I have set up "goals" for each stick to try to obtain. In order to pass each goal, the stick must succeed in passing 10 iterations of Sandra memory benchmark "burn-in" wizard and one full 3dmark test to be deemed stable. My test rig is one specifically designed for true 500MHz memory performance. An Abit IT7 Max 2 with a crystal ORB chipset cooler provides the high FSBs required, and a specially selected Pentium 4 2.26GHz CPU from our Aussie friends at Sephiroth Computers. With the help of the Vapochill Premium Edition, I can get the CPU to 3.2HGHz. If you work that out, that's a 17x multiplier running at 188Mhz FSB. Since Abit boards have the capability to run the memory at the 3:4 or 1.33x setting that equates to precisely 250MHz. This makes it the perfect rig for this review, and I think the first of its kind in the review community. I will be testing the sticks of memory at two sets of timings, relaxed and aggressive. The timings for each setting are as follows:
Relaxed
•Cas Latency: 2.5
•Precharge to active: 3T
•Active to precharge: 7T
•Active to CMD: 3T
Aggressive
•CAS Latency: 2
•Precharge to active: 2T
•Active to precharge: 6T
•Active to CMD: 2T
Even more aggressive timings are of course possible, but as those in the know understand, a CAS latency of 1.5 and Active to Precharge of 4 or 5 does little to effect system performance but a LOT to reduce stability. Let's take a look at each brand in alphabetical order, starting with Corsair.
