With the incarnation of 333MHz chipsets from VIA (KT333) and ALi (as seen in the Iwill XP333), as well as a multitude of PC2700 - compatible Pentium 4 boards, a number of memory manufacturers have seen fit to release PC2700, or 333MHz DDR memory. Early revisions were questionable at best, with a number of review sites having to result to high voltage just to hit the rated speed. Now that the standard has been approved by JEDEC, and has had time to mature a little, I figured a round up was now in order. Since the OCZ scandal on the Mad Onion forums started up about a month ago, It was brought to my attention just how many of you fear that manufacturers send us reviewers out cherry-picked review samples. Whilst I cannot say whether it is true or not, I decided that getting these samples from the retail division would ensure that I am getting the same stuff that you people will if you decide to purchase any one brand.
The contenders
We have six different brands up for punishment, namely Samsung, Corsair, Nanya, OCZ, Kingmax and Winbond. [UPDATE - we have now added a second Corsair piece, and modules from Crucial and XtremeDDR]. For each brand I will be having a look at the company, their products in detail and of course see how far we can push these chips! I'd like to thank the following retailers for their kind cooperation in lending me the memory samples for the review: Overclock.co.uk, Chillblast, PC-memory-upgrade.co.uk and hitechpc.co.uk. As I obtain more samples, I will be updating the review with these new makes. If any reseller would like to lend us another brand of RAM please contact me personally.
I have set up "goals" for each stick to try to obtain. My test rig is an Epox 8K3A+ (reviewed here) which has a maximum usable operating frequency of 200MHz FSB. Naturally to obtain this extreme speed an unlocked CPU is needed, and I am using a 1700XP with a 6x multiplier setting. Since no one is interested in slow-timing performance these days, I will be exclusively testing the RAM at high performance timings. Lets hope the chips are up to it! The two settings to be used are "Fastest" and "Turbo" with the latter confusingly being quicker than "fastest". The timings for each setting are as follows:
Fastest
•SDRAM Cycle Length: 2
•Bank Interleave: 4 Bank
•Precharge to active: 3T
•Active to precharge: 6T
•Active to CMD: 3T
Turbo
•SDRAM Cycle Length: 2
•Bank Interleave: 4 Bank
•Precharge to active: 2T
•Active to precharge: 5T
•Active to CMD: 2T
As you can see both timings are very aggressive, with CAS 2 and 4-bank interleave activated on both. Turbo is however more taxing on the chips. Let's take a look at each brand in alphabetical order, starting with Corsair.
