The Athlon XP 1700+ is unlocked by the nForce2 motherboard, and can be adjusted to use a 200MHz (400MHz DDR) Frontside Bus. It's a waste to test PC3200 on an Athlon system with anything lower. Mushkin ram was manually set to 2-2-2-5, in line with the SPD reading the EPoX 8K5A2+ interpreted. 4-Way Bank Interleave was enabled as well. Now then...
Benchmarks
Everyone loves ray..er..Sandra.
The increase over single channel PC3200 isn't as dramatic as I had hoped for, although the fault lies with the Athlon XP's low FSB, and the nForce2. Still, the ram achieved 95% and 90% on Int Buff and Float Buff respectively, which is nothing to scoff at. Were you to use this kit with a P4 C and i875-based motherboard, scores of over 6000 mB/s would easily be achievable.
3DMark2001SE, no cheating here!
Again, there isn't a whole lot of gain from using the ram, despite how 3DMark2001SE loves memory bandwidth. Unless you're using nForce integrated video, as I've demonstrated in my NF7-M review, you're not going to see a whole lot of improvement on Athlon systems.
