After testing at 166FSB I decided it was time to see what this RAM was really made of. I spent about 30 minutes playing with different FSB, multipliers, and voltages and I was finally able to reach the highest most stable speed. I got this XtremeDDR PC2700 to run at 175 FSB with a VDIMM of 2.9v and with a CPU Vcore of 1.85v. This PC2700 is only 8Mhz away from PC3000 speeds so with a better motherboard, or better cooling you might be able to get it there! I am pretty impressed with the overclocking ability of this RAM but lets see how the benchmarks go.
From 166 to 175 FSB there isn’t a huge improvement in the scores from SiSoft Sandra, however there is a gain that is for sure. It has been said that this EPoX motherboard puts out some low memory scores for whatever reason I am not sure nor can I say this is a fact because it is the best KT333 motherboard I have ever used.
With this overclock there was only a 10 FPS gain in Quake 3 and a 3 FPS gain in Jedi Knight 2. It seems that the only major increase in performance is that from 133 to 166 FSB, there is an improvement in scores at 175FSB however not as large as before. Also I only had the CPU overclocked a little more than stock because I was going for the highest FSb rather than the highest total overclock.
Conclusion
This being my second encounter with XtremeDDR I must say that my thoughts on the company has not changed. I still find them to be a great company that produces high quality, fast, and overclockable RAM. This PC2700 DDR was almost able to reach PC3000 speeds which is considerable.
The fact that the KT400 chipset is coming out makes PC2700 less desirable because it is now time to get PC3200 and faster to really utilize the new chipset. If you are a devout overclocker and want the fastest thing on the market I would suggest getting some PC3200 or PC3500 (I will have a review on the PC3500 soon) rather than this PC2700. However if you have just upgraded to a KT333 motherboard and are satisfied with it but want a little more performance out of it this PC2700 will help you do that.
The market for PC2700 is going the way of PC2100 but it still has a lot of life left in it so don’t be afraid that you will left behind in the never-ending pursuit for the fastest computer because unless you have a ton of money to spend you will always be obsolete.
Overall I am going to give this stick of RAM an 8/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval, I would like to thank XtremeDDR for sending this over to review and if you are looking to buy some of this RAM you can find it at PC-PitStop for only $92
Pros
- Uses Samsung B3 chips
- Very high quality
- Overclocks really well
- Different color heatspreaders
Cons
- PC3200 & PC3500 are out
