The biggest challenge in many respects is finding
a system capable of stressing this memory. I spent the best
part of a full day trying out various motherboard combinations
looking for one that I felt was letting the memory run unrestricted
by other system timings or restrictions and even now I don't
honestly believe I achieved that aim. Sure I could run at 200MHz
(400MHz DDR) on a couple of KT400 board here but even with the
most aggressive memory timings set the results were pretty mundane,
in fact so mundane that they were being easily being beaten
out by the KT333 at the same timings. I didn't get time to fully
test an Albatron KX400-8X Motherboard we have here although
on a few initial results it seemed to offer similar scores to
the AD77 Infinity board. I'm reviewing the Albatron very shortly
so with any luck I'll be able to tweak it up a little.
Another interesting problem I faced was that the
retail AD77 Infinity (KT400) from DFI refused to run the Corsair
at 333MHz at ANY setting. I tried every possible manual
configuration there is then switched to SPD but the system just
wouldn't complete 3DMark without crashing. When I switched the
memory bus over to 400MHz it ran like a charm no matter how
aggressively it was timed, though changing the timings made
little difference to the results at this speed. Maybe it's just
me but for as long as motherboards are changing "unseen"
settings behind the scenes without any methods of intervention
from the user there's never going to be accurate way to benchmark.
An example of this is the fact that benchmarking the AD77 Infinity
with the memory timings set to the most aggressive available
actually gave a lower score than setting the general system
performance setting to "Turbo". This suggests that
activating the "Turbo" setting is increasing performance
through BIOS settings that the user simply doesn't have access
to. It also means that these performance enhancing settings
can be toned up or toned down without any indication that it's
happening, something that was obviously happening when running
a 200MHz memory bus.
In the end the best I could manage was 214MHz
(428MHz DDR) on the Epox 8K3A+ with the suggested memory timings
set. This was at stock voltage and this is without a doubt a
limitation of the motherboard rather than the memory as I've
noticed its overclocking potential reduce over the past few
months. Well, it has had a tough life :)
Unfortunately the Apogee7VJL once again topped
out at around 170MHz (340MHz DDR) and so I had to retire it
at the first bend. Here's some results.
PCMark™2002
is a completely new, multipurpose benchmark, suited for benchmarking
all kinds of PCs, from laptops to workstations, as well as across
multiple Windows® operating systems. This easy-to-use benchmark
makes professional strength benchmarking software available
even to novice users. PCMark2002 consists of a series of tests
that represent common tasks in home and office programs. PCMark2002
also covers many additional areas outside the scope of other
MadOnion.com benchmarks.
3DMark2001 SE (1024x768) :
Conclusion :
Corsair have yet again upped the ante in the memory
stakes with what is some of the fastest DDR memory on the planet,
the real question here is who needs it? Well, as you can probably
guess from the price Corsair realise that they have a potentially
pretty small target audience. That audience consists primarily
of three groups of buyers, there's those who like to push their
systems to the absolute limits at any cost and who need to know
that no particular component is letting the side down, then
there's those who simply have to have the biggest, the fastest
and the most exotic components on the market no matter what,
and finally there's those who buy for the future in the hope
that other components will develop enough to one day make their
purchase useful. Even combined these three groups of users make
up a ridiculously small percentage of the active PC market so
I simply can't knock Corsair for setting a price that puts it
some way beyond your regular memory stock.
It's a shame that the PC industry is in such disarray
at the moment with so much potential around. We've got the KT400
which, despite its name doesn't support DDR400 officially, then
of course there's nForce2 which does unofficially supports DDR400
but which is optimised for synchronous memory/FSB clocks which
at the moment means 266MHz as AMD's 333MHz FSB parts aren't
quite shipping yet. So we've got CPUs at 266MHz, we've got official
chipset speeds of 333MHz and we've got memory running at 400
and 434MHz. This plus the much lower PCI and AGP bus speeds
is making for a very inefficient architecture all round.
Still, Corsair aren't responsible for the failings
of the rest of the industry and it's usually as a result of
companies like Corsair pushing the envelope that others get
their act together and follow the lead. The fact is that Corsair
are offering simply the best memory around, the question is
do you have a system that can benefit from it?
