| OCZ Technology 4GB PC2-5400 Vista Upgrade Edition DDR2
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Configuration:
The OCZ Technology 4GB PC2-5400 Vista Upgrade Edition DDR2 kit was installed in a system with the following components for this review:
» Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Dual Core processor
» ASUS P5KC P35 ATX motherboard
» Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB hard drive
» PC Power and Cooling 750 Quad Silencer power supply
» Cooler Master iTower 930 ATX
» Windows Vista Home Premium
The first thing to be learned by someone not familiar with the subtleties of the various operating systems is that just because you install 4GB of memory doesn't mean you will have 4GB of memory to use. 32-bit versions of Windows definitely won't get you there, and even if you have a 64-bit version you may not see all of your memory. Explanations of the issue and potential work arounds are available around the Internet, and one at OCModShop is concise and worth reading.
With the system described above booted into Windows XP Professional (32-bit) I was able to see 3.12GB of the 4GB installed. Booting into Windows Vista Home Premium proved to be no different, so people that bought this memory kit thinking it was universally compatible with all Vista packages may be a bit disappointed. There is no disclaimer on the packaging or elsewhere, so the less informed consumer might feel duped. Trying a few of the tricks mentioned in the article linked above got the system to see 3.32GB; better, but not great.
The screen captures shown below are taken from CPU-Z. On the left we see the "Memory" tab which indicates that Windows Vista Home Premium sees 3328MB of memory, at 333MHz (667MHZ DDR2), and that the timings are 5-5-5-15 2T. On the right we see the "SPD" tab which provides some extra information on the modules, including the timings that could be expected at lower frequencies.
 
While these systems couldn't see all 4GB, how about a x64 version like Vista Business 64-bit? With the modules snuck in to someone else's system just for testing, I was surprised to see that all 4GB of memory still weren't available to Windows. The work around linked above may help, or maybe you would like to read the official Microsoft Knowledge Base entry on the subject.
One thing I can say is that Fedora Core 7 x64 Linux was more than happy to have 4GB of memory on board, so maybe companies should start marketing these kits to where they are usable right out of the box! OK, Fedora Core 7 actually saw 3.9 of 4GB, but that is better than any Windows operating system was able to do, and it didn't require any tweaks. I didn't look, but maybe there is a way to get that last 0.1GB if you were really interested.
Overclocking and Optimizing:
Given the historically good overclocking results I have had with just about any OCZ Technology memory, I was hopeful to work some magic with this kit. 2GB modules generally don't overclock very well, but I really just wanted to get from 667MHz to 800MHz in order to make this kit comparable to the more standard PC2-6400.
This rather pedestrian overclock proved to be a dream... Despite various attempts to get above 720MHz, that was the limit, and not a very stable one. Adjusting voltages, timings, frontside bus speed, and other processor settings had no impact, and I wound up continuing with the review with 700MHz (350MHz x 2) as the top speed for testing.
With an extreme overclock out of the question I went about tweaking the timings to see how much lower than 5-5-5-15 I could get while running at 667MHz. Sometimes tighter timings are better than higher clock speeds when it comes to system performance anyway. After numerous rounds of every combination I could come up with, I was resigned to the fact that 5-5-5-15 was it! I assumed something like 4-4-4-13 may be possible based on what I had seen on another OCZ Technology kit with similar timings, but the system wouldn't boot if any one of the values was set to anything less than specified.
The bottom line of this section is that this kit is intended for a desktop system with a processor expecting 667MHz DDR2 memory. Just because it doesn't overclock doesn't mean it can provide a valuable upgrade to a system, and many slightly older systems might not be able to take advantage of the higher clock speeds, but the extra capacity could provide a huge boost.
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