Date: January 26th, 2003
Article by: Roger (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner & Head Editor)
Product was donated by: Crucial
<-- SHOP FOR PC3200 DDR400 MEMORY HERE

BENCHMARKING EXPLAINED

Because of the CAS 3 latency on the Crucial, it was apparent that a high overclock would be damn near impossible. I cannot stress enough though that this is mainstream RAM and not intended to overclock. That being said however, I was very very impressed with the results. Despite the RAMs refusal to operate at lower timings, it still managed to attain DDR436 and held its own in every benchmark. Hell, at the default settings, it even managed the jump ahead of its competitors. Not to mention how well it performed in single channel mode.

I was not able to attain a stable overclock with a 2.5 CAS, regardless of how high the timings where. With the OCZ and the ULTRA, I was able to play with lower timings but in the end, all of the memory modules performed at their peak at the settings listed above.

That being said, here are the benchmarks.....

3DMARK2001SE v330

Both in single and dual channel mode, the Crucial did amazingly. And to be honest, it only trailed by a bit when overclocked. It is important to note that it did not attain the same overclock though which influenced these results.

SISOFT SANDRA 2003 - MEMORY BANDWIDTH BENCHMARK

Here you can see that the Crucial actually outperformed the OCZ in the float buffered test when running in single channel mode. Overall, these results are very impressive.

GLEXCESS v1.2V

Now here was the pleasant surprise. In dual channel mode, the Crucial led the way and in the overclocked benchmarks, it trailed ever so slightly behind the OCZ.

GLExcess is a fantastic benchmark, as it is unaffected by unbiased and offers reliable results.

QUAKE 3 Q3CRUSH TIMEDEMO BENCHMARK

You can see that the memory is neck and neck in these test, largely due to the video card I used for these tests (the HIS 9600SE).