Testing

For testing memory modules we run the modules through several synthetic and gaming benchmarks at different speeds to glean an idea of their speed and to also assess their ability and overclocking and the gains seen from this practice. The tests that we ran were as follows:

Everest Read/Write, 3Dmark06, SuperPi 1.5 (1m calculation), Sisoft Sandra Bandwidth, FEAR demo, X3 Reunion demo, Company of Heroes and Half Life 2: Lost Coast.

All tests were run three times and the average taken of the results. If any anomaly was found among the results all 3 tests were repeated.

The PC that was used for testing these modules was as follows:

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

The results are taken at the kits stock, rated and fully overclocked speeds. These were:

Stock: 800mhz @ 2.1v
Rated: 1067mhz @ 2.2v
Full overclock: 1128mhz @ 2.3v

The reason we pick these speeds to test at is because when running a kit that is rated as faster than PC2-6400 speeds you have to overclock it to reach its full potential; at stock it will still run at 800mhz (6400 speeds). By overclocking the modules to their rated speeds we can see the benefit of running a kit such as this against a PC2-6400 kit equivalent that may not reach this speed.

The "Full Overclock" setting is where we try and push the modules a bit further to see if anything more than rated can be squeezed out of them. In this case the full overclock was 1128mhz which was a bit lower than I expected. However, I think with a more overclocker friendly motherboard you may see better results than I did.

For the Stock and Rated settings the CPU remained at stock frequency but due to divider constraints, to reach the full overclocked setting the CPU was overclocked to 2.54ghz (from 2.4ghz) and this should be taken into account when viewing the results as it will have affected the scores slightly.