Testing

For testing memory, we run through a series of synthetic and real world benchmarks to ascertain the performance of the modules under their stock speed, their rated speed and at their fully overclocked speed. The tests we run are as follows:

Everest read and write tests, SuperPi mod 1.5, 3Dmark06, Sisoft Sandra bandwidth test, FEAR benchmark and X3 Reunion benchmark.

All tests were run 3 times and the average of the results taken to ensure that the scores were accurate. If there was a large anomaly in the testing we repeated the 3 tests again.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Sapphire x1900XT @ stock
Antec EarthWatts 500w

Overclocking

As previously stated, when testing memory modules we feel it is important to let you know their abilities at overclocking. That is especially true of memory kits that have rated speeds higher than PC6400/DDR2-800 as they will not be running at those speeds without overclocking. This particular kit, is rated at DDR2-1067 so we need to overclock it to 1067mhz to run it at its rated speed. This was no problem as you can see the results of this speed below. However, there is always a bit more to be gained out of memory, so up went the voltage and up went the FSB. After a while of booting, rebooting and Bus raising, I hit a wall at 1160mhz, a very respectable speed for an already very quick kit.

NB. For the stock (800mhz) and rated (1067mhz) tests the E6600 was running at stock but due to motherboard constraints for the fully overclocked (1160mhz) setting the CPU was overclocked slightly as well which will have had some effect on the benchmark scores.

Results

As you can see from the results, there is a pretty big increase from running these modules are their rated speeds in both the synthetic and gaming tests. It is especially interesting to see the effects of simply raising the memory bandwidth on SuperPI, where CPU speed is often seen as the be all and end all of decreasing your times.

Cost

There has been price crashes on this kind of memory recently with this exact kit being found for as low as £135 at some retailers; a ridiculous price for such a high performing kit.