Testing

Installation

As the heat spreaders are pretty low profile, installation was very easy. The modules seated perfectly into the DDR sockets. If however you aren’t comfortable with installing RAM, the included installation leaflet is very useful.

Methodology

For testing memory modules, we run them through a series of synthetic and gaming benchmarks to determine their performance at stock, rated and overclocked speeds. This helps show the benefits of using overclocking kits and of overclocking them further.
The PC used to test this kit was as follows:

Some of you may be wondering why, after we stated that 4 GB is only fully utilized in a 64bit O/S, we are using XP x86 to test this memory. We feel that a kit aimed at gamers and overclockers is most likely to end up in an XP x86 machine due to the problems outlined at the start of this article. So, we decided to test it on a 32bit XP system; the overclocker's and gamers’ O/S of choice.

It needs to be taken into account when viewing the results that when the memory is overclocked, the CPU is overclocked with it. This will affect the scores slightly.

Overclocking

Overclocking the Crucial Tracers was relatively easy. I upped the DRAM voltage to 2.2V and slowly added 10 to the FSB speed in intervals. The memory modules managed to reach an overclock of 940MHz where it became slightly unstable in Windows. After dropping this down to 930MHz, it became stable and ran the benchmarks perfectly. This is a pretty good overclock for DDR2 memory and safely clocked my E6750 to a speed of 3.72GHz.