Crucial PC3200 2GB Kit

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by Matthew Harris on November 18, 2005 in Miscellaneous

Just because a memory kit is ‘value’ doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of your attention. Today we are taking a look at a fair priced 2GB kit from Crucial, which rolls in at DDR400 speeds. Let’s see how it stacks up, and see if we can squeeze any overclocking out of it.

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After some work, I managed to uncover the highest stable speed for the Crucial CT12864Z40B.M16FD, which was 214mhz at 2.5-4-4-8 2.89Vdimm. For overclocking, I’m limited to running a divider of 5:4 to keep the ram stable. Oddly enough the CAS# Latency has nothing to do with the stability issue, as it errors at 2.5 and at 3 at the same point, so the issue lies with either RAS# to CAS#, RAS# Precharge or the TRAS#. I just thought I would point this out just in case you were thinking that maybe by raising the CAS# Latency, you’d be able to squeeze more speed from these sticks. That just isn’t the case.

As we can see from Everest at default speed with the CAS settings of 2.5-4-4-8, the Crucial ram has a bit of a lead over the OCZ PC4200 with a latency of 3-4-4-8. I tried booting the OCZ with a comparable latency setting but sadly it won’t boot at anything but 3-4-4-8.

As the FSB speeds increase, we see that the read speed increases and the latency decreases. Oddly enough at 214 1:1 the write speeds are unchanged.

At a FSB of 267 with the divider at 5:4 for a ram speed (again) of 214 you’ll note that the reads have really pepped up with an increase of 481MB/s over the same ram speed at 1:1 and a decrease in overall latency of 10.6ns but the write speeds only see an 89MB/s boost but compared to the OCZ at 200mhz FSB 1:1 you’ll note that it’s still a respectable boost.

In SANDRA, we find that the OCZ and the Crucial are pretty close to being tied at 200FSB 1:1. Aat 214 FSB the performance has picked up close to 225MB/s across the board with the Float becoming the fastest calculation that the ram performs. With the FSB at 267 and a 5:4 divider, this evens up considerably with the Integer once again gaining the lead, but by a very narrow margin. It does however gain well in excess of 600MB/s over the 214FSB 1:1 which so far is the most impressive performance increase we’ve seen.


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