Legit Reviews

Had the chance to use my Transcend Jetram ddr2 667 for a build so I replaced it with some good Mushkin 800, Before I swapped it out I ran some benchmarks to make sure I was getting a performance increase.

I'm running a mild overclock on an Asus M2N-E FSB was running at 200 X 11 (on a amd athlon x2 4200) yielding 2.2 GHZ so I increased the FSB to 220 kept 11X for the multiplyer bumped the stock Vcore a hair, ran memtest and Orthos for 4 hours apiece and it was stable running cool 42 under load (With a MediaPc Icetank 2 120mm front and back in a push pull config, and a 80mm blow hole fan pushing cool air on top the ice tank)

I ran the tests on the ram with a fresh install of XP Pro SP2 with nothing running in the background (a backup install I keep on a separate hard drive)

The Transcend I was running at 5-5-5-15, with the mild overclock it was reading 806 in Memtest86+
The Mushkin was running at 5-5-5-18 at 962 (for some reason it picked up performance at 18 though the package said 12 was default, stock 1.8v was used)
(ran with 2 gig in case I burn a set I have 2 gig in reserve)
Then I went into Windows and ran Sisoft Sandra 12c memory benchmarks.

The Transcend was running at 7600 MBS
The Mushkin ran at 8233 MBS (with the 18 setting) an increase of 633 MBS at first I was shocked until I realized 633 MBS translated to 37,980 MB per minute then I was satisfied I had made a good decision, not an overwhelming gain but hey for 60 bucks you take what you can get (50 after rebate I'll probably never see)

Then I got to reading the Crucial Ballistix Review new out this week, (great review LR!) it was running at 9108 MB/s then the chart below was 8069 MB/s is that speed a result of some type of bottle neck, when it comes to memory it seems like a clock speed of 1600 on what has to be a better board than my Asus M2N-e (Cause we all know LR gets all the good toys ) Has memory technology out ran existing technology to drive it? I was thinking that at $456 this must be some fire stick ram. If anyone has a clue, clue me in.

In case there's any nay sayers here's a pic of the bench.

The Crucial review by Nate was using an Intel setup.

AMD will give better memory throughput because of the on-die memory controller. If the Crucial review was done on an AMD setup, my guess is the Sandra score would be closer to ~13K if not a lot more!

Memory bandwidth / Latency is not everything though, It's how the CPU uses that data that matters ;)

BTW if I was you, I'd be running with all four dimms loaded!

Oh ok, thanks Ken had me a lil knocking my head on the wall. I do run with all 4 Dimms but when I'm clocking and stuff I take 2 out cause the rma time would kill me to be without my desktop. Right now I have 11 and 2 lappys but only one of each is mine lol. The others are sale units so I kinda guard mine when I'm messin with it.

So intel is kickin AMDs butt in processor speed, and multimedia performance but AMD utilizes memory better. Wouldn't it be great if they could put it all together in one package.

Methious wrote:So intel is kickin AMDs butt in processor speed, and multimedia performance but AMD utilizes memory better. Wouldn't it be great if they could put it all together in one package.

Yep, it's called "Nehalem".

I'm glad to see Intel is going to incorporate an on die memory controller and graphics controller in Nehalem, and on the 45mm architecture. I wish they would get a better name though that one kinda sounds like some thing you'd spit out after coughing.

Methious wrote:I'm glad to see Intel is going to incorporate an on die memory controller and graphics controller in Nehalem, and on the 45mm architecture. I wish they would get a better name though that one kinda sounds like some thing you'd spit out after coughing.

Won't be the general public name, just like conroe isn't for the current core 2 duos.

Dan