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A Closer
Look
This is the second time I've seen the OCZ XTC heatspreader, and I have
to tell you I like it. XTC stands for Xtreme Thermal Convection.
The new heatspreaders are lighter and perforated. The honey-comb
design allows for greater air flow over the memory chips.
According to OCZ this eliminates the "dead air" space and prevents heat
from building up.
Testing
and Overclocking
For
a few more weeks, DDR2 is exclusively an Intel memory. As soon as
AMD releases the AM2, all of the AMD fanboys will get to play with DDR2
as well. Intel's current chipsets are ideal for testing high speed DDR2.
I have chosen the P5WD2 Premium board that sports a 955 chipset. I
know this board is capable of 280MHz+ front side bus. 1000MHz is
not a standard memory setting yet, so to get that option on this board I
have to at least have the FSB set to 250MHz. Unfortunately, the CPU I
have is limited to 266MHz FSB, so this will only allow for a mild
overclock of the memory.
| Motherboard |
Asus P5WD2 Premium |
| CPU |
P4 640 LGA775 |
| Video |
ATI X800XT |
| Memory |
2GB PC2-8000 Platinum
Edition XTC |
| Power Supply |
AeroCool ZerodBA 620w |
| Storage |
400GB Seagate HDD |
| Optical |
Lite-On 16X DVD+/-RW +DL |
| OS |
Windows XP SP2 |
It's
pretty awesome to see 500MHz in the frequency
field. With that as a starting point, I jumped into the BIOS
to see what we could get. Setting the FSB to 266MHz the
computer powered on like it always does without breaking a sweat.
Realizing that 266MHz was only putting the memory speed at 1067MHz,
I had to think of another way to see what this memory was capable
of. I went back to the BIOS and tightened the timings.
You can see the default timings in the screenshot above. The
timings I settled on were 4-3-4-12. This is a considerable
improvement over the 5-5-5-15 default settings. Even running
at 1067MHz with these timings barely put a strain on the memory.
Bumping the voltage up to 2.2v solved all problems and kept the
memory still within the range of the warranty.
|
Bus Speed
(MHz) |
DDR Speed |
Memory
Timings |
Sandra
INT |
Sandra FPU |
Everest Read |
Everest Write |
PCMark 05 Memory |
|
250 |
1000 |
5-5-5-15 |
6396 |
6397 |
7532 |
2915 |
5222 |
|
266 |
1067 |
5-5-5-15 |
6820 |
6832 |
8050 |
3089 |
5572 |
|
250 |
1000 |
4-4-3-12 |
6439 |
6438 |
7610 |
2951 |
5245 |
|
266 |
1067 |
4-4-3-12 |
6869 |
6875 |
8138 |
3146 |
5595 |
I think it's safe to say that this memory is not being strained by a
mere 67MHz overclock. This memory has a lot of overclocking
potential left. It easily maxed out my system at 266MHz and
still had enough headroom to tighten the timings.
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