Introduction
Introduction
As you may have seen in our recent 256MB Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM Review DDR memory is the way of the future! With prices close to standard SDRAM and gains in speeds of about 10-30% it can't be bad!
In this review I will spare you the "Walk down memory lane..." section that was featured in the Crucial review. This time we will get right to it!
However, a few facts need to be told again:
Not many people can use DDR RAM yet, as it has a different connector to standard SDRAM. Where regular SDRAM uses 168 pins, DDR RAM uses 184-pins. However, many motherboard manufacturers have come out with DDR boards, and new ones are released weekly.
DDR RAM comes in two flavours: PC1600 and PC2100. PC2100 SDRAM is used in systems with a 266MHz front side bus, and PC1600 SDRAM is used in systems with a 200MHz front side bus.
What makes DDR SDRAM special is that it reads information on both the rising and falling edge of the CPU's clock cycle, which theoretically doubles the speed of memory processing over standard SDRAM. As you will see on the next page, the speed isn't exactly doubled, but it does perform a lot better than standard SDRAM.
Ahh, that was it, now let's move on...
The Thermaltake RAM
Thermaltake is not known for making RAM, but rather for their Golden Orbs , Chrome Orbs, Super Orbs, Blue Orbs also known as GOrbs, BlOrbs etc (funny names, eh?). Not long ago they came out with heatspreaders and heatsinks for DDR RAM, and not long after they sent DDR RAM on the market themselves.
The RAM up for review today is is a 128 MB stick of Thermaltake PC2100 DDR memory. It is priced at US $68 according to Thermaltake - which seems fairly reasonable considering that you get a set of heat spreaders and heatsinks with it. The stick is rated at CL2.5, just like the Crucial RAM.
What differentiates this RAM from the Crucial RAM is the fact that Thermaltake sells this with overclocking in mind. Taken from their site: "If you have not tried our special DDR RAM then you have not feel the power of over-clock yet!". (Not my wording, it's a direct cut & paste job  ). Well, we'll see if it can live up to it...
Packaging
Packaging
Thermaltake RAM comes packaged like the above picture. The RAM including heat spreaders and heatsinks are all packaged in this nice looking plastic casing.
Appearance and what you get
RAM without heat spreaders Here is how the RAM looks without the heat spreaders on. The chips are made by Samsung.
RAM with heat spreaders The RAM came like this with the heat spreaders preinstalled.
Heatsinks These are the heatsinks that are also in the package. I will add these to the RAM later on in the review and see if they make a difference to performance.
Test Setup
| HARDWARE | | CPU | AMD Thunderbird 1000MHz AXIA Y Stepping (Week 10) | | Cooler | ThermoSonic ThermoEngine V60-4210 | | Motherboard | Asus A7M266 (AMD 760 Chipset) - click for review | | Memory | 256MB Crucial PC2100 SDRAM - click for review
128MB Thermaltake PC2100 SDRAM | | Hard Drive | IBM 30.7GB 75GXP 7200 rpm | | Video Card | Leadtek Winfast Geforce 256 32MB SDRAM | | Sound Card | Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live Value | Network Interface Card | | |
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| SOFTWARE | | Operating Systems | Windows 2000 | | Drivers | Nvidia 6.50 DirectX8.0
VIA 4-in-1 V4.29V | | Benchmark Software | SiSoft Sandra Pro 2001SE |
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