One of the "fringe benefits" of reviewing hardware is that you are forced to see how far you can push your rig. Since we have to see just how much performance we can squeeze out of each component we review, the end result is a rig that is on the brink of vaporizing at any minute because of the sheer speed that it is tuned to. Last week I had the pleasure of pushing the Zenith 7NJS to 182MHz FSB and the fact that I could see that kind of performance was largely due to the very stable RAM so kindly provided by the folks at LethalPC.

The RAM modules I am talking about come from XtremeDDR, a company that might not have the name recognition like Corsair, but for those "in the know," supply us greedy gamers with some of the fastest, pre-tested RAM money can buy. I have here in my sweaty palm two 256MB sticks of their 400true. This memory is clocked as 3500+ and sports Samsung chips and anodized aluminum heat spreaders. The name 400true is obviously derived from the bus speed that it should be able to obtain, and XtremeDDR guarantees that their memory will do just that. Lets see for ourselves, shall we.

Each stick comes in a nice plastic blister pack, well protected from the clumsy couriers who might not understand just what it is they are delivering. The packaging also makes a great storage container for your old memory because, chances are, you won't be putting it back in your machine after this.

First, I'll offer a very brief lesson on memory performance. As PC engineers strive for maximum system performance, they look for bottlenecks. A bottleneck is a place in a system where performance is bogged down which causes a ripple effect on overall performance; call it the "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link" philosophy. Well, to overcome these bottlenecks (mainly in FSB performance) motherboard manufacturers gave us more control over the internal workings of the BIOS. One recent feature is the ability to run your RAM at a different bus speed, or asynchronously, from your CPU. This is a great theory: you can run your CPU at 133MHz while your RAM zips along at 166MHz. Unfortunately, with this new configuration, a new bottleneck has been created, this time between the RAM and the CPU. So, what effectively seems like what would be a performance gain, ultimately leads to an overall decrease in performance. So, while asynchronous memory/CPU bus speed option is available on most modern motherboards, I have found the best performance to be had by running the RAM and CPU in sync, and if more performance is needed, I up the whole system bus; with the two in sync, I have achieved much better ACTUAL results, even if the numbers in the BIOS seem to look slower... So with that in mind, I will be running all tests with the memory interface set to sync unless otherwise noted.

The samples I received, as well as being different colors, happened to be slightly different sizes and had slightly different eeprom chips in the corners; however, I dare not remove the heat spreaders to look for fear of voiding the warranty. I usually investigate far more thoroughly, and I apologize for short-changing you this time, but I plan on pushing this RAM as far as I can, and that lifetime warranty just might come in handy. And I am reassured by the guarantee on the label that says that "each stick is 100% pre-tested on a motherboard at the speed it is rated for."

I have already had the pleasure of working with these modules for quite sometime by now (sorry Bill), and am already convinced that this is some seriously stable RAM. So without further ado I'll jump right in to testing and see just how stable it remains under serious pressure.

Next Page