OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Gold GX XTC Review

Name: OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Gold GX XTC
Brand: OCZ

W1zzard

on Nov 16th, 2005,

in Memory.

Manufacturer: OCZ

Value and Conclusion »

Test Setup

Test System
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 3000+ Venice
Motherboard:	DFI LanParty NF4, Bios 5.10-2 Fix
Memory:	2x 512 MB OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Gold GX XTC
Video Card:	ATI Radeon X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor Diamondmax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC PurePower 475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.11

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.

Next, 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 214 MHz the system got instable.

Our next test uses 2.7V DDR voltage. Here the memory takes 215 MHz which is only a small improvement over the results at 2.6V.

Further increasing voltage to 2.8V and 2.9V gave us the expected overclocking and performance gains. The memory maxxed out at 3.0V with an impressive 238 MHz - remember it is advertised as 200 MHz.

We did try to increase voltage even further, but the overclocks were actually a little bit less.

Relaxing the memory timings to 2.5-X-X-X or even 3-X-X-X did only yield a few more MHz, definitely not worth it if you take the performance loss into account.

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

OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Gold GX XTC
CPU Clock & Memory Ratio	Memory Speed	Memory Timings	Everest Read	Everest Write	Everest Latency	Quake 3 Timedemo	3DMark 2001SE	SuperPi Mod 1M
8 x 200 1:1	200 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.8V	5692 MB/s	1946 MB/s	49.1 ns	229.9 fps	20802	46.33 s
8 x 214 1:1	214 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.6V	6079 MB/s	2084 MB/s	46.0 ns	243.3 fps	21816	43.33 s
8 x 215 1:1	215 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.7V	6100 MB/s	2085 MB/s	45.7 ns	246.3 fps	21952	43.20 s
8 x 224 1:1	224 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.8V	6363 MB/S	2176 MB/s	43.9 ns	256.8 fps	22622	41.45 s
8 x 227 1:1	227 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.9V	6451 MB/s	2203 MB/s	43.3 ns	260.2 fps	22834	40.92 s
8 x 238 1:1	238 MHz	2-2-2-5 3.0V	6739 MB/s	2340 MB/s	41.8 ns	272.2 fps	23760	39.20 s
JEDEC DDR400A	200 MHz	2.5-3-3-8 2.6V	5639 MB/s	1890 MB/s	51.9 ns	226.8 fps	20264	46.95 s

For an easier comparison with other modules, we set a maximum voltage of 3.0V 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: