by Rob Williams on September 12, 2005 in Miscellaneous
Being the hardcore gamers that we are, the need for more than 1GB of memory is becoming evident. Last year, 512MB didn’t cut it, especially when playing top games like Half-Life 2 and Doom III. Now, current and upcoming top games are demanding more than 1GB, like BF2 and FEAR. Today, we are taking a look at a 2GB kit that is designed specifically for gamers.
To see what these modules can really do, we are using a variety of benchmarking techniques and tools. Here is the system that we are testing these modules in. You may notice that I am using a unusual BIOS. This one is an updated 706 version that was released by Tony Leech of OCZ. I have been using it for a few days now and it’s extremely stable. I enjoy edits he made to the BIOS to make overclocking even friendlier.
Processor
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Motherboard
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Power Supply
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Coolmax CXI 400W
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Memory
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2GB (1*2) OCZ Gold GX PC4000 3-4-4-8 @ 3.0v
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Hard Disks
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Sound Card
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Video Card
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Etcetera
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Windows XP Professional with SP2
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For benchmarking each one of our stable settings, I used Everest Ultimate Edition and the included memory tests. Everest’s memory benchmarks are still really CPU reliant, but if you are to use these sticks on an AMD, you will likely be using 2.50GHz anyway. After Everest, we use the reliable Sandra 2005 memory bandwidth tests.
Before we get into the results, here are the three stable settings that I have tested the memory with:
- 250HTT – 3-4-4-8 – 2.7v (Stock)
- 250HTT – 2.5-3-3-8 – 2.7v
- 263HTT – 3-4-3-8 – 2.7v
We will get more about these settings in the overclocking part of the review. Let’s first check out the results of both programs:
I’m impressed with the Read/Writes here. I assumed the higher timings would really affect the scores, but these are bang on. Looking back at our Ballistix PC4000 review, we can see the scores at the same speeds and timings are extremely close. The only difference here is, that we have a 1GB advantage over the memory in that review.
Once again, these are fantastic scores for the modules. I can’t pick out anything wrong here, great stuff! These modules are meant for gamers for a reason, so let’s jump into a few gaming benchmarks!