OCZ 3700EB: Making Hay with Athlon 64

OCZ impressed us with the fresh approach to DDR memory in their introduction of PC3500EB. 3500EB proved that there was much more to memory performance than just CAS latency - something that most in the industry knew, but had been forgotten in the rush to low CAS timings at any cost. 3700EB extends the range of EB, adding a DDR466 rated DIMM to the EB line.

If that was all that was going on, we would have made a brief First Look and announced the new speed. This time around, though, we were intrigued by two developments. First, in conversations with OCZ, it became clear that the main impetus for developing EB memory was some problems with Hynix memory compatibility on the Athlon 64 platform. Hynix memory has been widely used by all the major memory suppliers for the high-speed memory now on the market. Second, the ready availability, for the first time, of nForce3-250 motherboards for Athlon 64 with working PCI/AGP locks. Those two factors piqued our curiosity enough to take a closer look at EB on Athlon 64 on a nForce3-250 platform. The results were well worth the effort.