Date: February 23rd, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Crucial
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SiSoft SANDRA Memory Bandwidth Module (Settings: CAS2)

Ok, so let's give the memory a little test shall we. The Crucial ram is technically rated at CAS2.5, so technically it's not supposed to work at that speed. Well, overvolting it to 2.8 volts certainly helped and this was the result.

As you can see, the ram worked fine at CAS2 and rewarded an increase of 244 Mb/sec bandwidth. That is quite an increase and was noticed when the computer seemed to bootup and load Windows 2000 pro about 5 seconds faster. There was no instability noted and I tested it by playing a half an hour of Unreal Tournament 2003. Everything was silky smooth with no problems. Impressive in my mind.

How did the Samsung ram fare?

This result boggled me. I have no idea why setting the ram to it's actual CAS2 rating warranted a performance drop of 359MB/sec. I can't understand why having the bios set the timing rather than the ram's EPROM would result in a speed decrease of this magnitude. Guess the ram couldn't hack it. If you have any idea why this came about email me HERE.

As a humorous note, the DDR400 wouldn't even post at CAS2. The system literally would not do anything, not even a bios screen. And seeing that the Crucial memory wasn't that far behind memory bandwidth wise, DDR400 isn't really worth the money difference. Go figure.

PCMark2002 Memory Score

Let's see what Madonion's computer testing software has to say about the three ram modules. All PCMark tests were run at CAS2 settings except for the DDR400 ram.

As a baseline, I threw Crucial's sample through the test and came out with a respectable score.

Just like in the SANDRA test, the Samsung memory scored lower. But wait, you gotta see this. The DDR400 running at "By SPD" is coming next, and you will really be surprised at the result.

The "technically superior" PC3200 ram scored 378 points lower, than even the inferior Samsung ram. Is the DDR400 spec a complete joke, because I have no clue why this is occurring. DDR400 in my mind is becoming more and more of a joke and is not worth the hundreds more to get expensive DDR400 ram and an expensive board to support it. BAH! Rant! Rant! Rant!