OCZ EL DDR2 PC2-4200 Gold GX XTC Review

Name: OCZ EL DDR2 PC2-4200 Gold GX XTC
Brand: OCZ

W1zzard

on Jan 21st, 2006,

in Memory.

Manufacturer: OCZ

Value and Conclusion »

Test Setup

Test System
CPU:	P4 3.0E 1MB Prescott
Motherboard:	ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE i925XE
Memory:	2x 512 MB OCZ EL DDR2 PC2-4200 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 5.13

Performance

Usually we are showing you here a comparison of how well memory gains from increasing voltage. During first tests we found out that the PC2-4200 Gold GX does not gain any overclocking at all from increased voltage.
That's why we will be focusing on memory timings during this review.

First, we tested how the memory performs at the default settings recommended by OCZ. When these settings are applied and the overclocking starts, this memory reached fast DDR2-720 speeds.
If you can overclock that much, why not reduce the timings some and get extra performance in return? We gradually tried tightening timings and saw a sweet spot which offers a good compromise between timings and overclocking headroom at the 4-4-2-4 setting. Here the maximum overclocking is reduced only by a few MHz, while performance is a good deal better due to the tighter timings.
Another timing set we tried was 3-3-2-4 which is the best we could get the memory to run at. While overclocking is down a lot here, this might be a good setting for people who are not going to overclock, but still want to get the most out of their memory.

Running more relaxed timings, which would usually give you a higher maximum memory overclock did not help at all. At best we saw a 1 MHz increase over the plateau of DDR2-720. Such a small overclock is not worth it, for the loss of performance caused by the loose timings.

For further comparison, the test "JEDEC DDR2-400" 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
15 x 200 1:1	200 MHz	4-4-4-12 1.8V	5331 MB/s	1591 MB/s	104.3 ns	285.6 fps	20360	44.63 s
15 x 200 1:1	200 MHz	4-4-2-4 1.8V	5539 MB/s	1738 MB/s	99.3 ns	287.7 fps	20574	43.84 s
15 x 200 1:1	200 MHz	3-3-2-4 1.8V	5656 MB/s	1842 MB/s	93.2 ns	289.6 fps	20714	43.38 s
15 x 269 3:4	360 MHz	4-4-4-12 1.8V	7654 MB/s	2574 MB/s	70.5 ns	388.6 fps	26321	32.26 s
15 x 264 3:4	352 MHz	4-4-2-4 1.8V	7869 MB/s	2732 MB/s	70.6 ns	348.0 fps	26102	32.56 s
15 x 213 3:4	284 MHz	3-3-2-4 1.8V	5958 MB/s	2141 MB/s	82.8 ns	311.5 fps	22056	40.11 s
JEDEC DDR2-400	200 MHz	4-4-4-12 1.8V	5331 MB/s	1591 MB/s	104.3 ns	285.6 fps	20360	44.63 s

Overall performance is very good across the board. With that much overclocking headroom there is no reason to run your memory 1:1 to your FSB.

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 DDR2-400 memory running at JEDEC DDR2-400 (4-4-4-12). The average percentage of the three benchmarks is listed in following table: