Geil Ultra Plus 1gb PC6400

Geil Ultra Plus 1gb PC6400 Review

Introduction

Geil have been making waves in the memory market for years now and are looking to continue that trend with their latest and greatest modules, the ultra series. I have been lucky enough to receive a 1GB kit of 6400 memory from that very range. It boasts extremely tight timings and a wide range of safe voltage variation, lets see what these babies can do.

Specifications

  • Available in 1GB Dual Channel Kit (512MB X 2) Sku# GX21GB6400PDC, 2GB Dual Channel Kit (1GB X 2) Sku# GX22GB6400PDC
  • GeIL OC Certified FBGA 64MB X 8 or 128MB x 8 DDR2 Chips
  • Working Voltage : 1.9 – 2.3V
  • 240pin, Un-buffered DDR2 DIMM
  • Metallic Racing Orange Heat Spreader
  • Retail Package
  • Life Time Warranty

Bits and Box

These modules come in some rather fancy packaging; the box coloured like carbon fibre and a picture of a speedometer cranking up to the extremes. On the front there is also a couple of “Cuts” in the packaging to give you some teaser shots of the modules inside.

Geil Ultra Plus PC6400 Box

The back of the box has little information, apart from letting you know what speed and size your modules are with little stickers over the respective boxes.

Geil Ultra Plus PC6400 Rear

Geil Ultra Plus PC6400 Box Rear

With the modules themselves you also receive a little piece of cardboard with some information that apparently you should read before “Unleashing the beast”.

Geil Ultra Plus PC6400 Label

The Ultra Modules

These sticks feature the new Geil “Ultra” heatspreaders which are sleek or boring depending on your taste. However, they do come in a very fetching bronze “Racing Orange”colour.

Geil Ultra Plus PC6400

For information on heatspreaders, please read our glossary article here.

On the front of each stick there is also a little Geil logo:

Geil Logo

And the infamous dragon hologram sticker which also shows you the specs of the kit.

Dragon Spec Hologram

Installation

Installation took seconds, no problem fitting these modules in as the heatspreaders fitted very tightly around the sticks causing no problems with my large tower CPU cooler.

Installed

Testing

For memory testing we run several synthetic and real world gaming benchmarks to test the capabilities of the memory at stock and under its fully clocked state.

We run: 3Dmark01, 3Dmark06, PCMark05, SuperPI mod 1.5, Sisoft Sandra Bandwidth Test, Everest Read and Write and X3 Reunion.

The rig that this memory was tested in was:

Core 2 Duo E6600
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Silverstone Olypia 650w
MSI 8800GTS
Spire Blackfin case with Noiseblocker 120mm’s fitted in the front and rear; side panel 120mm fan disabled.

Overclocking

These modules overclocked like crazy! I set the voltage to the max these modules are stated to take (2.3v) and the timings to 5-5-5-15 and began cranking up the FSB. After a bit of fiddling I was able to get these modules windows bootable and benchable at 1100mhz; this kit even POSTed at 1133mhz!

NB. XSR Recommends active cooling on modules during overclocking.

Speeds Benched at:

CPU: 2.4ghz
Memory: 800mhz

CPU: 2.48ghz
Memory: 1100mhz

Results

3Dmark01

3Dmark06 and PCMark05

In 3Dmark01 and 06 the overclock gives some small performance gains. In PCMark the overclock gives better results, but still nothing to write home about.

Sandra and Everest

In Sandra and Everest we see some much better results. In the Everest Read test there is almost 30% increase in read time score.

X3 SuperPI

FEAR

FEAR, SuperPI and X3 showed only small gains when overclocking these modules. This could be put down to the fact that FEAR is GPU dependant, and the other two respond much better to CPU overclocking than anything else.

Cost

This kit can be found for around £90 which is a reasonable price for such a powerful 1gb kit.

Conclusion

The Ultra Plus 6400 kit from Geil is an absolutely fantastic overclocker. It has crazy tight timings at stock speeds, but loosen them up and crank up the voltage and you will have some monster overclocks on the horizon. The fact that this is a 1gb kit will hold back those looking to game with this kit but anyone looking to spec up a solid Athlon64 or P4 rig would be well advised to think of the Geil Ultra series 1gb kit.

Pros Cons
Good stock performance Slightly mundane heatspreaders
Awesome overclocking ability Held back with 1gb capacity but available in 2gb kit

XSR Value Award

I’d like to thank our sponsors Geil for providing us with this kit.

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