Introduction
Introduction
It is for a known fact that Intel's new memory standard, DDR2-533, will offer no performance increase over DDR-400. But how will DDR2 perform when overclocked? How well does it overclock? Will pure MHz be the only factor, or will timings be just as important? These are some of the questions we will attempt to investigate in this article.
Ultra low latencies on DDR2 were pretty much unthinkable, let alone possible a few months back. However, with the recent yields of Micron's DDR2 chips, 3-2-2-x timings (tightest timings possible on most i925x motherboards) have been reported achievable by some enthusiasts. Of course, we were immediately interested, and obtained a Micron-based DDR2-675 Dual Channel Kit from a relatively unknown (at least to many enthusiasts) company – Wintec Industries.
As for the motherboard, we choose the Abit AA8-Duramax. This was because the motherboard has been typically known to reach FSBs of over 250MHz easily. A wide range of voltage controls in the BIOS also contributed to our decision. In order to overclock to high FSB's on the i925/915 chipset series, voltage is of particular importance. With higher voltages, of course, comes additional heat. Even a stock speeds and voltage, this chipset outputs a substantially greater heat than their i875/865 predecessors. For this reason, we opted to use Thermalright's copper mini-SLK, the NB1-C.
Test System
- P4 730 (3.4Ghz Gallatin) & P4 560 (3.6Ghz Prescott) – Engineering Samples
- Abit AA8-Duramax Motherboard – BIOS v17
- Wintec Industries AMP-X DDR2-675
- Powercolor X600XT 128mb
- Enermax Noisetaker 470w – ATXv2.0 version
- Maxtor Maxline III 250Gb HDD
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