Corsair has long been known as one of, if not the best memory for overclocking. I left the timings at 4-4-4-12 and started increasing the FSB while adding more voltage to the CPU, memory, and northbridge as needed. My final result was a FSB of 270 taking my 2.8GHz Pentium 4 to 3784MHz! To achieve this overclock I flashed the BIOS to version 15 and set the DDR voltage to 1.9v, northbridge to 1.65v, and CPU to 1.5875v. I did not lock the PCI-Express bus but did lock the PCI to 33.33MHz. I could tell that the memory had a lot more in it but my processor seemed to be maxed out which is understanding since it was running almost 1000MHz faster than normal. If I increased the FSB any more it simply would not take, even with more voltage to everything. With an unlocked processor this memory could be taken even farther but you will need an engineering sample for that.
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Activity LEDs
I made a short video of the activity LEDs in action so you could get an idea of how they look. I turned down the lights so that the LEDs could be easily seen for the video. In full daylight you are able to clearly see the LEDs but for the video darker was better. The below video is a 1MB Windows Media 9 file so you will need the codec if you don’t already have it. If you are not in a Windows environment I have also encoded the movie in MPEG format for your viewing pleasure. The following file is the same movie but a 5MB MPEG1 version which has been zipped for compression, to download this file click here
Conclusion
Though I have always known Corsair memory to be the very best they have again surpassed my expectations. With DDR2 being fairly new to the market its full potential has yet to be seen. Within the next 6-12 months we should see DDR 2 to start becoming more predominate while DDR is slowly phased out like SDRAM was when DDR was introduced.
Motherboards and chipsets will also continue to improve giving more headroom to quality memory like this which begs to be overclocked. Though there is very little talk at this point for AMD to start using DDR2 it’s only a matter of time. You can see throughout the benchmarking that running both DDR and DDR2 at the processors standard memory speeds there is not a huge difference. However when you really take the memory to where it should be the results are phenomenal.
This memory is going to cost you some cash though, about $400 for 1GB which may be more than some want to swallow. What I really want to stress about this memory though is you will not be disappointed if you are using a good motherboard and processor and want to do some serious overclocking. If you are an average user or something who really isn’t concerned with overclocking I would advise you to stick with Original DDR and wait a while for all the new technologies out there to catch up with each other.
Because I am so impressed with this memory and am going to give it a 10/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Corsair for making this review possible.
Pros
- DDR2 potential can easily be seen
- Highly overclockable
- Very impressive memory scores
- Heatspreaders with activity LEDs
- Takes over where DDR1 stops
Cons
- None
