Crucial PC3200 2GB Kit

The Crucial CT12864Z40B.M16FD kit consists of 2 * 1024MB sticks of some very unusual (for DDR1) ram. It uses BGA chips as opposed to TSOP. This is unusual for DDR, but pretty standard for DDR2, which at first had me wondering if I’d received a DDR2 set by mistake!

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

The ram arrived in a nice little box instead of a blister pack like some makers use.

Inside the box, there were two sticks of ram individually packaged in anti-static bags along with a multi-lingual installation guide that covers every type of ram package from EDO-SIMM to SODIMM to DIMM.

But upon pulling the ram out of it’s anti-static bag I was greeted with this, which was quite a bit different:

The ram is rated at 3-3-3-8 at 200mhz which is fairly standard for value ram. As the speeds of the ram are decreased, the CAS latencies are tightened by SPD to 2.5-3-3-7 at 166mhz to a fairly impressive 2-2-2-6 at 133mhz. This means that if you have an older AXP system riding on the NF-2 chipset (which supports ram of this size), you can get some low latencies for a decent price. The same can be said of the P4 – B series which uses the 533mhz bus since the FSB of the "B" series is 133mhz. A 3.06Ghz HT P4 will be able to benefit from low latencies and is compatible with the 865/875 chipsets for improved bandwidth afforded by dual channel DDR… and everyone that is an Intel faithful knows the P4 craves bandwidth.