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Date: February 1, 2006
Author(s): Rob Williams
Editor: Matt Harris

If you are in the market for a 1GB DDR2 kit, then this kit proves to be a great choice. Despite being value memory, it overclocks quite well with the ability to keep stock timings.

Overclock-ability

Intel System

• CPU: Pentium D 820 @ 2.8 GHz - 3.85GHz on AIR
• Motherboard: ASUS P5WD2 Premium w/ 0606 BIOS
• Memory: OCZ 1GB Gold PC2-5400 XTC 4-4-4-12
• Video: eVGA 7800GT 256MB PCI-E @ 490/1.15
• Sound: Realtek HD Audio (Onboard)
• Storage: WD 200GB 7200 8MB
• Odds and Ends: External WD 200GB 7200 8MB via USB2.0
• Etcetera: Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows x64 Professional SP1, NVIDIA 81.98 Drivers

Before I attempted to overclock anything, I ran MemTest 1.65 overnight to make sure there were no errors at stock. When I find a new setting I want to test, I load up MemTest again. To make sure my current setting is stable, I run MemTest's #5 test in a loop of 3 and it's test #8 in a loop of 2. Once that's done, I consider it a stable overclock and continue up the ladder. My highest overclock is one that still uses a stock CAS setting. Here are my results:

• FSB 200 (DDR2-667) - 4-4-4-12 (1.9v)
• FSB 200 (DDR2-667) - 3-4-3-8 (1.9v)
• FSB 220 (DDR2-733) - 3-4-3-8 (1.9v)
• FSB 240 (DDR2-800) - 4-4-4-8 (2.0v)
• FSB 267 (DDR2-800) - 4-4-4-8 (2.0v)
• FSB 275 (DDR2-733) - 4-4-4-8 (2.1v)
• FSB 275 (DDR2-825) - 4-5-5-10 (2.1v)

My final overclock attempt, DDR2-825 proved error free in a MemTest run over the course of 10 hours. I am quite impressed by the overclocking ability here, I was able to push them further than I originally anticipated. Granted, I had to raise the TRCD and TRP, but the benchmarking results prove that it's hardly an issue! Speaking of benchmarking results, let's get right to them.

There is a newer version of EVEREST available, but it's results were jumping all over the place which is why I chose to use last years version. Each test is run three times and the average of the three are the final result.

Since I am pretty new to the DDR2 world, these results impressed me quite a bit. At stock speeds the modules yielded near 6,000MB/s read and overclocked was just short of breaking through the 8,000MB/s mark! We can see that the overclocking tightened up the latency quite a bit also. 20ns difference from stock to overclocked is quite a large difference.

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