Date: April 28th, 2004
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: PMI
<--Shop for the PMI 1GIG DDR400 PLATINUM TURBO DUAL CHANNEL MEMORY KIT

PRODUCT OVERCLOCKING POTENTIAL

Memory benchmarking using the Tweaknews testbed always starts off with a memory voltage increase to 2.8volts to make sure the memory is not hitting any bottlenecks through insufficient power. After the voltage increase is in place, the memory timings were dropped to 3-8-4-4 to allow the memory to reach its highest overclocking potential without having the memory timings being considered a factor.

Memory timings do play an important role if you are considering leaving this memory at its stock speed and want to squeeze every last bit of bandwidth from your new purchase, but if you are going to be overclocking, memory timings mean absolutely nothing when compared to the speed increase with the timings relaxed. You will get more performance out of relaxed memory running for example at 440Mhz when compared to tighter timings and the memory only running at 415Mhz.

Some people still think that timings are the key to getting every bit of performance out of your memory, but unfortunately this is not the case.

MHz matters. Follow that simple rule and you will take full advantage of all the speed you can muster out of your memory.

In the case of today's PMI memory, my overclocking results are below: (1:1 Divider)

Stock: DDR400

Overclock: DDR440

A completely stable 40Mhz increase over stock is nothing to sneeze at and brings even more product value to the table.

PRODUCT BENCHMARKING

Intel P4 2.4C 800FSB Retail CPU Comparison Shop for this item
DFI Lanparty 875PRO RevB 875P Chipset Motherboard Comparison Shop for this item
512 megs Corsair TwinX Series PC3200 Low Latency Memory Comparison Shop for this item
1 GIG PMI Platinum Turbo Series PC3200
1 GIG Corsair PC3200LL Pro Series Comparison Shop for this item
ATI All-in-Wonder 9700pro Comparison Shop for this item
Catalyst 4.1 Videocard Drivers (Driver Defaults)
Windows XP Professional SP1 Comparison Shop for this item
Maxtor DiamondMax ATA-133 30gig HD Comparison Shop for this item
Latest Intel Chipset Drivers

Benchmarking Programs Used:

- 3DMARK2001SE
- PCMARK2004 (Memory Score)
- AIDA32 MEMORY READ & WRITE BENCHMARK
- AQUAMARK 2 BENCHMARK (Benchmark#1: Default Settings)
- SISOFT SANDRA MEMORY BANDWIDTH BENCHMARK
- GLEXCESS V1.2v OPENGL BENCHMARK
- QUAKE 3 Q3CRUSH TIMEDEMO BENCHMARK
- AQUAMARK DIRECTX 9 BENCHMARK

Benchmarked Timings

Stock Settings

2-6-3-2 (200Mhz FSB : DDR400 : 2.4Ghz)

Overclock Settings

3-8-4-4 (220Mhz FSB : DDR440 : 2.64Ghz)

Both configurations are run at locked 1:1 memory and CPU FSB divider.

Benchmarking Explained

The benchmarking is going to be kept very simple and to the point. What I will be illustrating through the testing is the performance difference comparing low latency timed standard PC3200 at stock and overclocked speeds from each of the two manufacturers. Both dual channel kits hit their respective overclocking ceilings at DDR440 which will make for a very good comparison.

Let the testing commence.