Date: December 5th, 2005
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: OCZ
<--SHOP FOR PC3500 DUAL CHANNEL MEMORY KIT HERE
MEMORY OVERCLOCKING POTENTIAL
To test the memory's ability to overclock, I set the timings to 2-5-2-2, locked the divider at the stock setting of 1:1, maxed the memory voltage at 2.8volts, locked the PCI and AGP bus and bumped up front side bus until I reached the rated DDR433 which was at 217Mhz FSB. Seeing this is the speed this memory is rated at, I wanted to see if I could squeeze out anymore overclocking potential. To do this I kept everything the same and dropped the memory timings to 3-8-4-4.
But when I did this the computer would not boot up even when the memory was running at only DDR400 which for some reason means the memory's ROM is lacking any sort of timing adjustment on the canterwood board I was using to test. With the memory set to 2-5-2-2, I proceeded to try and find out just how I high I could push this memory and I came up with the following.
Here are the results:
The final result was DDR440 which is technically higher than what this memory is rated for, but I was a little disappointed that the memory wouldn't allow my to utilize the latency increase in order for me to take advantage of increasing my front side bus. I have reviewed PC3200 memory in the past that will overclock higher by quite a large margin.
To test this out, I threw in the PQI PC3200 memory I reviewed HERE , and was easily able to drop the timings to 3-8-4-4 and increase the memory to over DDR500. Now don't get me wrong, this memory does do what it claims and reaches DDR433 at 2-5-2-2, but I think the lack of extended overclocking through a latency increase is taking a lot of potential value away from this product.
The DDR440 overclock will be included in the upcoming benchmarking.
PRODUCT BENCHMARKING & TESTING
The Testbed is comprised of:
Intel P4 2.4C 800FSB Retail CPU Check Prices
OCZ TECHNOLOGY EL PC3500 GX GOLD EDITION DUAL CHANNEL MEMORY KIT
Abit IC7-G Max II Advance Canterwood Motherboard (BIOS Revision Version 22): Check Prices
Vmem = 2.8volts
Vcore = 1.60volts
ATI All-in-Wonder 9800pro Check Prices
Catalyst 4.3 Videocard Drivers
Windows XP Professional SP1 Check Prices
Seagate Barracuda V SATA ATA-150 HD Check Prices
Intel Application Accelerator ver2.3
Hyperthreading and PAT Enabled
Memory Benchmarked Against:
- 1GIG PQI PC3200 ULTRA LOW LATENCY DUAL CHANNEL MEMORY KIT
- 1GIG CORSAIR TWINX1024-3200XLPRO (2-5-2-2) Check Prices
- 1GIG PMI TURBO PC3200 PLATINUM (2-6-3-2) Check Prices
- 1GIG CORSAIR TWINX1024-3200LLPRO (2-6-3-2) Check Prices
Benchmarking Explained:
For this memory, I will be testing it at DDR400, DDR433 and at the maximum overclock of DDR440 and showing you how it compared to other memory configurations from other manufacturers. The only difference is the max overclock values from the other memory manufacturers will be at 3-8-4-4 timing seeing they allowed me to use it to allow a higher overclock.
Everything else is absolutely identical right down to the software and drivers. I will not be testing this memory at the CPU's highest overclock seeing to do so, I would be using the memory divider and essentially underclocking the memory below it's rated speed.
Let's see how it performed...
