Test Setup

Performance & Overclocking

The first thing done, when testing this memory is simply running it at the rated speed. A-DATA does not state an operational voltage at the rated speed of 1200 MHz. So I went ahead and tried 2.4V as this is what most such modules used. It worked flawlessly right away at this speed. Then I kept lowering the voltage while keeping the same speed and CL rating. Imagine my surprise when I set the memory to "Auto" in the BIOS and it worked without any problems. This theme continues at all CL settings. A-DATA has created memory which does not budge much at all. Nonetheless, the A-DATA offering is the first memory to manage 1200 MHz at default voltage. As this is the 1 GB kit, you may need to use more voltage.


After my amazement settled down, I used CPU-Z to check what the memory was programmed to run at. As you can see above, it may be set to 1402 MHz at very slow timings. The P5B Deluxe does not offer such slow settings and even when setting them to the highest possible values and 2.45V it did not budge much at all.

The next step meant setting the memory to 533 MHz and default voltage to see what timings the memory was capable of. It did not manage 3-2-2-4, no matter how much voltage was applied, but worked flawlessly with 3-3-3-4 at default voltage. The maximum speed difference between default and 2.45V is a mere 4 MHz and this is once again what we have seen at 1200 MHz. The same goes for CL4-4-4-8 with which I managed 382 MHz, with once again just a few MHz improvement with highest voltage settings. Relaxing the timings just a tad to CL4-4-4-12 suddenly resulted in a large jump, past the DDR2 800 MHz mark to 920 MHz. Once again, chainging the voltage is quite useless for this memory.









You would usually find a voltage scaling graph here, but the memory simply is not affected by any increase of voltage. It is completely driven by CL settings. Even changing it from CL4-4-4-8 to CL4-4-4-12 yields an improvement. This is great for people who do not have a mainboard with a lot of voltage tweaking options. Please note that each individual module overclocks different, the results here can only be seen as an indicator of performance.