It's not often that we cover seventeen motherboards for just one memory article, but ever since motherboards based on Intel's 800MHz FSB series of chipsets were released at the end of April/beginning of May we felt the need to educate our readers on the severe memory-related issues that have plagued these motherboards.
You'll remember from our 865 Chipset article we encountered a number of compatibility issues with DDR400 SDRAM and the 865PE chipset. It turns out that we weren't the only ones; users all over the web were reporting problems. As a result we felt it was necessary to get to the bottom of these issues, and so took it upon ourselves to test five of the most popular DDR400 memory modules and nearly all the 865PE/875P motherboards we had access to.
The Candidates
For this review we compared five pairs of modules: Corsair LL (Low Latency) TwinX DDR400, Crucial DDR400, OCZ EL DDR400, TwinMOS DDR400, and Kingston HyperX DDR433 (running at 400MHz DDR).
We requested a pair of 256MB modules be sent from every manufacturer to be used in this review. You'll find pictures of the modules we tested below:
UPDATE All graphs on the following pages represent performance numbers from Quake 3 Arena. The "/timedemo 1" benchmark was used.
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mrcaveman - Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - link
Great article. I set my watch by you guys. Most of my decisions about computer hardware is based on your very helpful articles. keep up the great work.Anonymous User - Sunday, August 17, 2003 - link
I noticed in your artical you use Hyper-x 3500. I purchased the Gigabyte 8KNXP and Hyper-x 3200, to my disappointment they are not compatible! Kingston has ignored all e-mails about this problem. I would not recommend any of their products if using this motherboard.Anonymous User - Friday, August 15, 2003 - link
At the moment looking for good memory for my Epox 4PCA3+ mainboard I purchased recently. Seems to be difficult to get the TwinX modules from Corsair (512 MB CL2) here in Holland, if you know a "cheap" supplier please post here...This article, this website very useful! In my favorites... YV
SoSolid - Tuesday, July 29, 2003 - link
This is a very useful article. Not only do we see just numbers indicating which manufacturer makes the most fastest memory but also in "final words" the author discusses some alternatives.Excellent!
shinerburke - Monday, July 21, 2003 - link
Why was Mushkin not included in this test? Also when will we see a similar test on the NForce2 boards?Dagger1011 - Friday, July 18, 2003 - link
How about twinmos? You only commented on the other three. In my country, only kingston and twinmos are available and unfortunately, hyperx is a lot more expensive than twinmos!Anonymous User - Sunday, July 13, 2003 - link
Well I'm just about to upgrade my PC and saw the TwinMOS package @ addonsonline.co.uk for £60. Sounds good for 512MB. I downloaded the CPU-Z program and checked the timings of my Crucial 256MB PC2100 DDR and to my suprise the CAS Latency is 2, RAStoCAS is 2, RAS Precharge is 2, and Cycle Time is 4???? is this not a bit fast???? OR is slower clocked memory able to run @ faster timings??Anonymous User - Saturday, July 12, 2003 - link
Further comment to the above...DDR-II is on the near horizon BUT will it be the answer for super-fast compatible memory?
New memory design, structure and packaging will probably require mew motherboards.(I envisage "teething problems" etc.)
Incompatibility will still probably reign!
Anonymous User - Saturday, July 12, 2003 - link
One wonders if these "compatabilty charts" still hold for larger sizes of memory like 2 off 512MB?What happens with greater than 1GB?
Are these REALLY new technologies or older DDR ones being "Officially Overclocked"?
viz ONE BIOS DOES NOT SUPPORT <2.5 CL
Memory with CL=2 are from CHOICE chips.
Memory with CL=2.5 seems to be the norm.
Thus memory with CL=3 are easily overclocked to CL=2.5.
Anonymous User - Sunday, July 6, 2003 - link
Interesting article.What does the graph show.
It has numbers at the end of the bars (e.g. 339.6) - what is it a measurement of.
Is a larger number better or worse?