G.Skill F2-4200PHU2-1GBNT Review

Name: G.Skill F2-4200PHU2-1GBNT
Brand: G.SKILL

W1zzard

on Apr 4th, 2006,

in Memory.

Manufacturer: G.SKILL

Value and Conclusion »

Test Setup

Test System
CPU:	P4 3.0E 1MB Prescott
Motherboard:	ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE i925XE
Memory:	2x 512 MB F2-4200PHU2-1GBNT
Video Card:	ATI Radeon X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor Diamondmax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC PurePower 475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.13

Performance

As first test we ran the memory at 200 MHz, at the standard voltage of 1.8V, to see how it performs at everything set to stock. The next test determines the maximum overclocking at 1.8V, which is something you would experience if your motherboard does not allow memory voltage adjustments at all.
For the next three tests we raised voltage in steps to 1.9V, 2.0V and 2.1V. As you can see the overclock scales very nicely with voltage. Further increasing the voltage did not help much. At 2.3V we saw about 375 MHz which is not worth it for the reduction of life span this brings.
In the next test we reduced the timings to 3-3-2-4 which are the tighest timings this memory can run at. The best timings you can set in the Intel chipset are 3-2-2-4, so what is possible with this memory is close to the fastest setting possible.
Next we tried to relax the timings to 5-5-5-15 to find out if we could get a higher maximum overclock out of the memory than at 4-4-4-12 which isn't the case.

For further comparison, the test "JEDEC DDR2-400" shows a generic DDR module running at JEDEC standard timings.

G.SKILL F2-4200PHU2-1GBNT
CPU Clock & Memory Ratio	Memory Speed	Memory Timings	Everest Read	Everest Write	Everest Latency	Quake 3 Timedemo	3DMark 2001SE	SuperPi Mod 1M
15 x 200 1:1	200 MHz	4-4-4-12 1.8V	5908 MB/s	4213 MB/s	100.4 ns	287.3 fps	20057	44.41s
15 x 217 3:4	290 MHz	4-4-4-12 1.8V	6716 MB/s	4622 MB/s	85.7 ns	315.0 fps	22060	39.92 s
15 x 235 3:4	315 MHz	4-4-4-12 1.9V	7292 MB/s	5021 MB/s	78.6 ns	344.5 fps	23649	36.74 s
15 x 253 3:4	337 MHz	4-4-4-12 2.0V	7827 MB/s	5388 MB/s	73.1 ns	386.6 fps	25043	34.13 s
15 x 272 3:4	363 MHz	4-4-4-12 2.1V	8365 MB/s	5757 MB/s	68.9 ns	392.2 fps	26194	32.03 s
15 x 203 3:4	272 MHz	3-3-2-4 2.1V	6407 MB/s	4341 MB/s	84.3 ns	300.0 fps	21146	41.80 s
15 x 272 3:4	363 MHz	5-5-5-15 2.1V	8276 MB/s	5778 MB/s	73.5 ns	390.0 fps	26154	32.34 s
JEDEC DDR2-400	200 MHz	4-4-4-12 1.8V	5902 MB/s	4215 MB/s	100.4 ns	287.5 fps	19917	44.34 s

For an easier comparison with other modules, we set a maximum voltage of 2.1V and tested until we found the highest clock frequency and fastest timings for this memory. The benchmarks Everest Read, Everest Write and Quake 3 were run. We then calculated the performance increase in percent compared to a generic DDR2-400 memory running at JEDEC DDR2-400 (4-4-4-12). The average percentage of the three benchmarks is listed in following table: