Test Setup

Performance

The first test we did was test how the memory performs at a stock frequency of 200 FSB with the default timings recommended by OCZ. We used 2.8V here as specified by OCZ.

Now we wanted to know if the memory can run at 2.6V. With 200 MHz it worked fine. We increased the memory clock step by step, to find out what the maximum clocks were when running at the DDR specification default voltage of 2.6V. At 211 MHz the system got instable.

We increased voltage to 2.8V and 2.9V but saw no difference in overclocking at all.

Next, we tried if we could run different timings than OCZ's recommended setting of 2-3-3-8. We found 2.5-3-3-8 to work very good. Actually, I would advertise this product as 2.5-3-3-8 with a higher clock frequency. In our tests the memory could do 241 MHz, at any voltage. So why not call it PC-3800 2.5-3-3-8 ?

In order to help you get a feeling of how much performance difference lies between CL2, CL2.5 and CL3 with this memory, we compiled you three benchmark runs. The only difference between the three runs was the CAS latency setting. Everything else was left from the previous run. The performance difference is about 2% between CL2 and CL3.

For further comparison, the test "JEDEC DDR400A" shows a generic DDR module running at JEDEC standard timings.




Giving performance numbers for 1 GB of memory vs. 2 GB is very hard. Most benchmarking programs are not made to benefit from more memory.

For me having a lot of memory is very important, since I multitask a lot. This is a typical process list for me when working on a review:


I usually take a ton of 8MP photos of whatever I review and it's just so much more convenient to drag all those photos into Photoshop and being able to sort them out, categorize and work on them at the same time without having huge slowdown because of the operating system running out of memory.

I do not play much, but with many newer games I tried it has occurred to me a lot that there were short loading pauses during gaming. For example in Battlefield 2, FEAR and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. After installing upgrading to 2 GB of memory all these lags were gone and the gameplay felt much smoother. You have to consider that the actual FPS did not increase, it was just that the horrible pauses during the action were gone.

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For an easier comparison with other modules, we set a maximum voltage of 2.9V 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 some standard DDR400 memory running at JEDEC DDR400A (2.5-3-3-8). The average percentage of the three benchmarks is listed in following table: