3DVelocity would like to thank Crucial in the UK and especially E.Anderson for their help and courtesy in providing this memory for review.

Part Three: Testing (2)

Firstly we have Madonion.com's 3DMark 2001. Not only is this an exceptional DX 8 benchmark, it also serves as a great bandwidth / memory test.
NB. I found at the start of testing the OEM ram was unable to run at any timing but Cas 2.5. 'Turbo' memory timings were selected on the KG7, as was 4 way interleaving.

(3DMark 2001)

(Results Expressed In '3DMarks')

(Quake 3 Arena)

 

(Sisoft Sandra's Memory Benchmark)

 

(Overclocking Results)

 

Part Four: Conclusions

As we saw in the Kingmax review the memory is a strong performer. The same thing has to be concluded here. However, the Crucial edged out the Kingmax in the Quake 3 time demo proving the two sticks are closely matched in performance. The Crucial stick has the advantage in the price department though and that is a big consideration for a lot of buyers. We can clearly see why I would never suggest buying unbranded ram. It wouldn't boot at Cas 2 and proved to be quite far behind the other two branded sticks in our test. Overclocking wasn't entirely conclusive as the KG7 test board we used is not always stable at higher frequencies (Over 153fsb). I wasn't too worried about this as, as is usually the case with overclocking, it is usually down to luck with memory unless you are shopping for guaranteed overclocking ram. I was pleased we were still able to see the obvious potential of both the Kingmax and the Crucial while also demonstrating what a bad choice for overclockers the OEM ram could be.
I would highly recommend the Crucial memory, it's very, very cheap at the moment and has obvious performance advantages and overclocking potential. If you can't quite afford to pick up some ram guaranteed for higher frequencies, you could certainly do a lot worse than this speedy memory.

Great price and performance....lets see how the Crucial ram scores.

--Crucial PC2100 Cas 2.5--

 

I hope you have enjoyed this review, as usual, questions, comments etc. welcomed - Martyn
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