This review will deal with four RAM manufacturers:  Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, and OCZ.  This is not a standard RAM review, in which a recently received stick of RAM is tested in a few benchmarks and results proclaimed; all of the RAM we’ll discuss has been in our labs at least six weeks, with some of it present as long as four months.  This type of pacing was deliberate, as it allowed us to use the RAM discussed herein in a wide variety of chipsets and motherboards, in synchronous, asynchronous, and overclocked modes.  Today we’re focusing on SPD (Serial Presence Detect) performance while running on a 166 MHz FSB, but follow-up articles will examine the impact of other performance situations and manual timings.

 Why SPD Timing?

 We’ve chosen to test SPD timings for our first analysis for several reasons. Memory timings are arcane to many people, not easily understood, and therefore less likely to be changed from their default settings.  Most motherboards will default to SPD, which gives us an opportunity to compare RAM performance with all sticks of RAM as timed by their manufacturers.  Secondly, because the memory we’ve tested here is set for different speeds, we’ll be able to analyze the performance impact between running in synchronous mode (166/166) and asynchronous mode (166/200, etc).  Much of the higher end RAM sold today is advertised as PC3200 or higher, but will a user actually gain any performance from running at these speeds?

 We will examine performance in overclocked synchronous mode and hand-timed settings in later articles.

 RAM We Tested:

 The following DIMM modules were tested for this review:
(Note--the following photos are stock and of 256 modules--actual module size is as listed).

Corsair XMS 3200 v1.1, 256 Meg DIMM:
Corsair XM3202v 1.1, 256 Meg DIMM: 

Kingston HyperX 3500, 512 Meg DIMM:

Mushkin PC3500, 256 Meg DIMM:

OCZ PC2700, 512 Meg DIMM:

 

Why the Disparity in RAM speeds and sizes?

 The differences in RAM speeds wasn’t planned, but as this is more of a comprehensive performance analysis than a simple review, it makes sense to examine multiple speed grades, especially when comparing synchronous and asynchronous performance.  Will PC3700 running asynchronously perform better than PC3500 running asynchronously?  Logic says it should, but we’ll find out. 

 The disparity in RAM size is simply a function of what test modules we received.  Although ideally we’d have had modules of a uniform size, we tested our selected benchmarks carefully to ensure that there was no contamination resulting from different module sizes.  Our detected performance difference in all of our tests was less than one half of one percent?well within an acceptable margin of error.    

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• OCZ, RAM Details (0 of 4)
• Benchmarks (0 of 4)
• Pricing (0 of 4)
• Overclocking, Conclusion (0 of 4)