Testing:
To test the performance of the OCZ Technology PC3200 DDR Special Ops Edition 2048MB Kit I installed the following equipment:
» AMD Opteron 148 processor @2200MHz (stock voltage)
» DFI Lanparty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert (default settings)
» 700W OCZ GameXStream Power Supply
» Thermaltake Eureka case
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA-II hard drive in RAID 0
» 1x 120GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
» 10-n-1 Media Card reader
» eVGA 7900GT PCIe card
Before I begin any testing, I verified the BIOS was reporting the correct default timings of 2.5 3-3-8 @ 200MHz. The DFI BIOS was reporting the correct default settings, but I did notice that the modules were set to 2.64V, which is below the 2.8V suggested, so I adjusted the voltage to 2.84. However, at stock speeds the voltage had no affect on the RAM, and it ran fine at 2.64V.
Overclocking:
OCZ say they designed this RAM with the gamer in mind. In fact, they specifically say this is designed for graphic intensive games such as Battlefield 2, Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Quake 4. Not all gamers want to mess around with overclocking and pushing their equipment to the max. Instead they want to get it installed and get back to the games. There are of course those that do want to overclock their setups.
While I'm certainly not the best at overclocking, I did get a bit of overclock out of this RAM. At default timings I was able to push the RAM to 230MHz FSB. If I lowered the latency to CAS 3, I was able to get a better overclock of 255MHz FSB. At 260MHz the system would not boot into Windows. I'm sure the experts will be able to get a much better overclock out of this RAM.
Benchmarks:
For the benchmarking portion, I will be evaluating the RAM at three speeds; 200MHz (2.5-3-3-8), 225MHz (2.5-3-3-8) and 250MHz (3-3-3-8). I will also include a base benchmark of my previous RAM, Corsair XMS4000Pro 1GB (2x512). This will be performed at the stock timings of 3-4-4-8 at 200MHz FSB. Also, as a reference, I have been able to overclock with this Corsair RAM to 245MHz in the test system, which is less than what the OCZ memory acheived despite having a lower speed rating.
The benchmarks to be run will include:
» SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory Benchmark
» Everest Memory Benchmark
» 3DMark2006
» Real World Gaming
» Quake 4
» F.E.A.R.
» Halo
SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark:
SiSoft Sandra 2005's suite of benchmarks includes one that offers a pair of results related to memory performance. The values are provided in units of MB/s, and higher values are better. As you can see from the data below, Sandra is reporting a significant boost in performance when overclocking.
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