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Crucial, now a brand of Lexar Media, has been in the game for over 10 years now. Longer than that if you count the father of Crucial, Micron Technology, Inc. Micron is one of the major players in the industry and I still consider them to be one of the best. In fact, Micron Technology, Inc. was one of our very first sponsors when we first started out back in the day of the Pentium II and the original Celeron. Over the years we've seen a lot of great products from Crucial. From the Ballistix line to the standard mainstream memory, if it's memory, Crucial has covered it all. Today we have the honors of testing some of Crucial's first Triple Channel offerings for the new Intel i7 Nehalem systems. We've heard that the new triple channel memory technology was fast, but we were expecting something like a 10 to 20% performance gain at the most. What we discovered first hand totally blew us away! What we have before us today is a Crucial Triple Channel Kit in the form of 3, 2GB DDR3 memory modules rated at PC3-10600. Let's dive right in and see what this triple channel technology is all about...
Specifications
Triple Channel Memory Defined The Intel® Core i7 family of processors ushers in triple channel DDR3 memory technology support. This new technology will take memory data transfer rates to the next level. With dual channel memory support, there are 2 memory channels. With Triple Channel, there are simply 3 memory channels. With Triple Channel technology, data bandwidth actually doubles to rates of up to 25.6 GB/s when operated in triple channel interleaved mode. Furthermore, the memory controller for the i7 is located on-die, which helps increase memory performance as well. I've read several articles about triple channel memory and some reviewers are calling triple channel technology "pointless" and "a waste of money". I couldn't disagree more. In some "real world" applications, the benchmarks are showing only slight increases in performance, but as you will soon see in our benchmarks, actually memory bandwidth is through the roof. Regardless of what some critics are saying, triple channel is the future and will be a necessity with 64-bit systems. As time goes on, technology will catch up to triple channel memory, just like it has with dual channel, the Intel Quad Core, DDR3, and so on. Those who say triple channel memory is "pointless", have no understanding of technological progress in the computer industry. As we make large leaps in individual component performance, it takes some time for the rest of the industry to catch up. Those who are quick to criticize technological breakthroughs are probably 30 something, using an old PII, and still living with their parent's basement... Triple Channel, Core i7, and ECC Support As I researched the technology behind the Intel Core i7, I discovered that current Core i7 design does not support ECC (Error Correction Code) memory commonly used in workstations and servers. An error-correcting code is a code in which each data signal conforms to specific rules of construction so that departures from this construction in the received signal can generally be automatically detected and corrected. However, in some of the Intel tech docs I've read, I discovered that even though the current Core i7 does not support ECC, there are some "high end" i7 server motherboards on the market that do. Confused? Good, so am I. I then had to research these motherboards in question. Looking at the fine print in the motherboard specs, manufacturers state the boards will support ECC only if the CPU supports ECC. Unfortunately, the current Intel Core i7 processor does not support ECC...period. As you may have noticed in the specs of the memory sample we have here today, our sample modules are in fact ECC and will not be supported by our ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard, not to mention the CPU. However, just because the motherboard does not support ECC doesn't mean ECC memory will not operate in the P6T. It only means the ECC function will not be supported. So now this question remains, why is Crucial offering an ECC triple channel/three channel memory kit for the i7 platforms when ECC can not be supported by the i7? I've spoken with my source at Crucial and this is the response I received: "Both the DDR3 ECC UDIMMs and RDIMMs are available in advance of the Core i7/Nehalem based server products. Until the server platforms launch officially, we’re offering ECC modules through our memory selector tools, but not in our configurator. This will all be available in the first week of January." From the response I received, it appears that the ECC kit we have here today is designed for Core i7 server products that will be available Q1 2009. Interesting... Will we soon see a Core i7 processor with ECC support? I guess we'll have to wait and see...
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