G.SKILL F2-6400CL6D-4GBMQ 4 GB Kit Review 4

G.SKILL F2-6400CL6D-4GBMQ 4 GB Kit Review

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Value and Conclusion

  • This 4 GB kit of G.SKILL 4GBMQ will cost around $500, which is a lot of money, but quite competitive compared to 4x 1 GB modules.
  • 4 GB
  • High clock speed
  • Runs fine at default voltage of 1.8V
  • Flexible timings, can run CL5 and CL4 at lower clocks
  • Good performance
  • Fair price
  • Slow default timings
  • Works best only on 64-bit OS with 64-bit applications
  • Limited voltage scaling
These modules are ahead of their time. The biggest limitation to their use are not the modules themselves, but the environment of most users. When running on 32-bit Windows you will not be able to utilize all 4 GB. When running on 64-bit Windows you may not have many applications that are compiled for 64-bit. On the other hand, users of Linux can definitely look forward to having more memory. With 4 GB kits becoming more and more available, this means that you can now build servers and workstations with 8 GB, without a lot of added cost, for FB-DIMMs for example (2x 2 GB FB cost 700$). Also you do not need to buy expensive server boards or server CPUs.
As expected the memory did not overclock much, but overclocking may not be that important for people who need 4 GB. When the system runs out of memory during memory intensive operations, it will start to swap to disk, which is more than 50x slower than the main memory. So just by adding more memory you could improve the speed of your memory-bound applications by the factor 50.
More memory may also be a good investment into the future. A fresh Windows Vista install will consume about 650 MB of memory during booting, without any applications running.
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Dec 18th, 2024 18:09 EST change timezone

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