Biting the hand that feeds IT
Biting the hand that feeds IT
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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/01/review_ddr_group/
(http://www.trustedreviews.com/)Group Review It may at first seem a little odd that with DDR 2 on the verge of a consolidated mainstream push, some manufacturers are still making a significant play for regular 'old' DDR users, but perhaps on closer inspection it's not as odd as it seems. DDR 2 is the future, of that there's little doubt, but for the time being at least the DDR market remains a large and potentially lucrative one. Contrary to allegations that anyone releasing enthusiast memory today is simply mopping up the dregs of a dying technology, I personally believe DDR's course has not yet run and that it will be with us for quite some time yet, even if only as a budget solution for the more cost-conscious user, writes Wayne Brooker.
Here we pitch DDR products from Crucial, GeIL and Buffalo, three companies known and respected for their solid, mainstream products but with only one having made any worthwhile inroads into the enthusiast sector up until now, that being GeIL.
With the enthusiast end of the memory market fairly crowded at the moment, let's see if any of these new products have what it takes to get noticed.
Buffalo did rather well in our last roundup - its PC4300 CL2.5 modules proved to be a very accomplished all round product despite the rather plain looks. For this reason I was quite pleased to hear that the company had released an enthusiast range of high-end memory called Firestix and was quite looking forward to running them through our test rig.
Firestix come in plastic semi-rigid blister style packaging a la Corsair. They are decked out with flame red aluminium heat spreaders, which feature the Buffalo and Firestix logos along with the part number, module type and CL rating on a separate sticker.
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Thermal tape is used between the memory chips and heat spreader and spring retaining clips are used for added security.
Rated to run at 250MHz with 3-8-4-4 timings at 2.6-2.8v, I'm told that Firestix rely on Hynix B memory chips which are fairly common in similarly specified modules.
SPD data wasn't read accurately in our test system and was set to 2.5-7-3-3. At 200MHz, performance proved to be off the pace slightly, as can be expected from these timings. It could be argued that I should have forced even better timings than these at such a low frequency but it must be remembered that we're not basing these memory roundups on enthusiast users. A mainstream user is unlikely to manually adjust memory timings so unless I see an obvious mismatch all testing is done using the pre-programmed SPD settings.
Overclocking using the SPD settings got me to a mere 220MHz which was rather a disappointment. Even 3-4-4-8 only just got me past the rated 250MHz to 258MHz, which was again rather a letdown - this is actually lower than the limit reached last time around with Buffalo's mainstream PC3200 and PC4300 parts. Naturally I tried a range of voltages but nothing above 2.8v improved the situation and lowering it only made matters worse.
Of course no two memory chips are alike and I may have just landed myself a poor sample, something I'll definitely investigate if I can obtain a fresh pair of modules to test. That said, performance isn't a long way off what Hynix B equipped memory modules seem to be delivering at present, but it is usually a touch better than this. It could also be a poorly designed PCB but that would be speculation at this stage.
Manufacturer Buffalo (http://www.buffalo-technology.com)
Price £99.99 (inc. VAT) for 512MB module
Price per Meg 19.5p
Rating 70%
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The fact that Crucial made any kind of move into the enthusiast memory sector came as a surprise to a lot of people. As a company that has thrived on supplying high quality, high value mainstream memory that never attempted to push beyond JEDEC's rather conservative timings, nor to offer any level of support for overclocking of products, the appearance of Ballistix on the market came as a bolt out of the blue.
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The Ballistix came packaged securely in a cardboard shipping box and sat in sealed anti-static bags. Each module comes with a rather nice Ballistix sticker and a small adhesive Ballistix badge. Installation instructions are also included.
The modules are finished with a fetching matt gold heat spreader which, to its credit, features the Crucial URL, the Ballistix logo and the batch and part numbers. These appear to be manufactured in aluminium rather than copper as seen on GeIL's heat spreaders.
Adhesive thermal tape is used between the memory chips and heat spreader but they are further secured by a pair of spring retaining clips per module. The underlying PCB is black, or to be more accurate a dark chocolate brown colour. The use of a heat spreader made it impossible to verify the memory chips used but it was quite clear from the little I could see that they were Micron chips.
Testing of the Ballistix modules was a genuine pleasure. Using the SPD setting accurately set the motherboard to run at the rated 2-5-2-2 timings. The rated voltage is an unusually high 2.8v and was set manually from the BIOS.
The performance running at a stock 200MHz was extremely high, matching or exceeding that from our previous roundup winner, Corsair's excellent 3200XL Pro. All tests including the 12 hour burn-in test completed with no hiccups.
Overclocking was an equally rewarding experience, though at SPD I hit a rather premature ceiling of 215MHz and optimism that I'd get much further was fading fast. At 2-7-7-3 I progressed on to 225MHz before easing off again to 2.5-7-3-3, which got me to a more respectable 235MHz, and then 2.5-8-4-4, which eased me to the 240MHz mark. At our usual, much more lax setting of 3-8-4-4 I hit the eventual ceiling of 265MHz. In actual fact I was able to browse windows and run a few benchmarks at around 272MHz but not with any great degree of stability. 265MHz was the highest bombproof setting. Increasing the voltage beyond 2.8v didn't help me progress beyond this level either.
Manufacturer Crucial (http://www.crucial.com/uk)
Price £91.64 (inc. VAT) for 512MB module
Price per Meg 18p
Rating 90%
GeIL has arguably made the biggest splash in the memory market with some extremely aggressive prices coupled with very strong overclocking potential. The Golden Dragon series of DDR modules also won a lot of admirers with its distinctive looks and innovative bare wafer chips.
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Ultra-X comes supplied in a very stylish, blue tinted hard plastic case with a slide-opening front panel. The modules are cloaked in anti-static bags and sit in holes cut in a foam packing panel.
Ultra-X is GeIL's assault on the low latency market coming kitted out with - Hand Picked 5ns GeIL Chips rated to run at 200MHz at 2-5-2-2 timings. GeIL also claims to have optimised its SPD for dual channel operation, which sounds reasonable but which I can't easily verify.
Ultra-X comes equipped with a mirrored chrome finish, silver heat spreader that's actually manufactured from pure copper before being tin-plated. Being copper it's very efficient at absorbing heat from the memory chips but, as is common, the chips and heat spreader rely on a thermal tape interface, which however efficient, will impact on their effectiveness. No retaining clips are used in addition to the tape.
When it came to testing, the first thing of note was that setting the BIOS to run using the memory's SPD settings did not set them at their rated 2-5-2-2 and I was forced the set the timings manually to give them a fighting chance.
Once set up manually the modules performed well at a stock 200MHz. Results were consistently on a par with other modules though slightly behind the Crucial sticks when taken across the full range of tests.
The 12-hour burn-in test completed first time and with no problems.
Overclocking the Ultra-X, however, was quite an experience. At 2-5-2-2 I hit the same 215MHz limit that the Crucial modules exhibited, but unlike the Crucial I was able to reach a heady 245MHz at 2.5-5-2-2. Slackening off again to 2.5-7-3-3 netted me an almost crazy 265MHz before finally at 2.5-8-4-4 I made it to an eye-watering 290MHz! To be honest, I had to back off to 285MHz to get the benchmarks to run for a prolonged period of time, but the fact that I never needed to increase the voltage to 2.9v or to lower the CAS Latency from 2.5 to 3 suggests it was the CPU that had reached its plateau not the memory, though at 290MHz I can't imagine there was a lot more left.
For the record, increasing the voltage to 2.9v had no effect on pushing beyond 290MHz, nor did setting it to CL3.
Manufacturer GeIL (http://www.geilusa.com)
Price £211.44 (inc. VAT) for two 512MB modules
Price per Meg 20.6p
Rating 90%
Perhaps the best known of the current system benchmark suites, we used only the memory bandwidth module in this instance. The module uses dynamic data creation at around 40-60 per cent of physical system RAM levels. Sandra's algorithm is also multi-threaded on SMP/SMT systems. It also varies alignment of streams until it finds the best option then tests repeatedly at this setting.
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AIDA32 is one of the lesser known but better respected diagnostic and benchmarking suites available for the PC in our humble opinion. The memory benchmarking module offers results for both read and write throughputs, but unfortunately it appears that AIDA's project leader has since moved on and so the future of this benchmark is somewhat uncertain at present.
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PCMark04 is Futuremark's second incarnation of the popular system-wide benchmarking software, though for the purpose of this roundup we used only the memory module. The exact weighting of the tests isn't made clear but the scores are based on a variety of operations including reading and writing data blocks to and from memory, data block copy functions and random data access along with latency testing.
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Unlike the other tests we used, Particle Fury uses a real time OpenGL 3D engine to render a continuous particle stream, which obeys the normal rules of physics. On P6 and faster CPUs the performance of this benchmark is almost entirely reliant on memory speed.
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Passmark Performance Test is an award-winning benchmarking suite. The default memory test uses a combination of memory data transactions to test overall speed. We particularly noted the overall score (Memory Mark) and the results for uncached reads.
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This is by far the most configurable and flexible of all the benchmarks with a bewildering number of parameters available. We used a variation on the default test and collated results for float copy, float scale, float add and float triad.
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Ballistix shows what Micron can do when it puts its mind to it. The fact that Ballistix comes with Crucial's keen pricing makes it all the more tempting and it should certainly offer enough of a balance between price and performance to do very nicely, even among the big-name competition.
GeIL has once again set new levels of value for money. At just over 20p per Megabyte the performance was simply mind-blowing, and while I can't say for certain that this is indicative of every Ultra-X module on the market it certainly bodes well. The inability of this module to run properly at its rated timings under SPD, however, means less experienced users may well get a lower performance than they should unless they're prepared to fish around in their BIOS. Also, its limited headroom at 2-5-2-2 and huge overclocking margin makes it more suited to the hardened overclocker in some respects. Once overclocked, our particular modules threw out the highest memory scores I've ever recorded in these benchmarks, a fact that must surely count for something if overclocking is important to you.
Buffalo's Firestix were, on balance, a bit of an anti-climax. Don't get me wrong, the performance is on a par with many of the similarly specified memory modules out there, but that's just it, there's nothing special here. The overclocking isn't impressive enough to win over the enthusiasts, the stock performance isn't good enough to win over the savvy buyers and there's no flashing LEDs or eye-catching cosmetics to win over the modding crowd. It's just another stick of reasonable fast, reasonably good-looking memory like so many that went before it.
There has to be a winner, and on this occasion it's quite a simple task. Impressed though I am with GeIL's Ultra-X and its 290MHz FSB overclock, this isn't much use to someone who has no intention of ever venturing beyond 200MHz, and at this speed Crucial's Ballistix is marginally faster and marginally cheaper. Of all the parameters tested we must treat overclocking potential as the biggest variable and therefore place less weight on this than we do on other, more repeatable performance results.
With that fact in mind I'm prepared to put my head on the block and pronounce Ballistix as the fastest memory I've so far tested at 200MHz. Add to this the accurate SPD data and sub-20p/MB price and Crucial must be congratulated on a barnstorming debut at the elite end of the memory market. ®
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