Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2108



We had a very interesting response to part one of our P965 Roundup. There was the central fact that we still have part two and three to deliver over the coming week. Yes, before anyone sends another message, both parts will be published by next Friday. However, there was one recurring theme in the hundreds of emails and private messages we received about the first article. This theme revolved around our choice of memory. We felt like dropping down to performance oriented DDR2-800 would be a better choice for this market in regards to price while it would still allow our P965 motherboards to overclock to their limits.

It turns out our choice of memory for the article is now priced higher than a lot of us make in a week. This was not our intention when we started the P965 roundup but over the course of the last eight weeks our GEIL DDR2-800 memory has witnessed an almost 60% increase in price. We have seen increases on average of 45% across the board since the beginning of summer in the general DDR2 market. The majority of higher end memory is experiencing even larger price increases along with very limited supply.

While we are finishing testing on two recently received P965 motherboards for the value sector roundup we decided to see how our new "value" performance memory would fair on the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard. Of course, this new value range is now DDR2-667 memory with typical timings of 4-4-4-12 and prices hovering around $220 for a 2GB kit. We decided to test 2GB memory kits from five different manufacturers to see how well they would perform with optimized timings at DDR2-667, DDR2-800, and however far we could overclock them before they went up in flames. Actually, there were no flames and we promise none of our modules were hurt during testing. Before we get to the results, let's take a quick look at our testbed.

Test System: Benchmark Setup

Performance Test Bed Configuration
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
(1.86GHz, 2MB Unified Cache)
RAM: Various
Hard Drive: Seagate 320GB 7200RPM SATA2 16MB Buffer
System Platform Drivers: Intel - 8.1.1.1001
Video Cards: 1 x MSI X1950XTX
Video Drivers: MSI/ATI Catalyst 6.10
CPU Cooling: Scythe Infinity
Power Supply: OCZ GameXstream 700W
Optical Drive: Sony 18X AW-Q170A-B2
Case: Cooler Master CM Stacker 830
Motherboards: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (Intel P965 C2) - BIOS F7
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2
.

We are utilizing our standard benchmark testbed from our P965 Roundup article. We chose several different DDR2-667 memory modules that were previously tested in our Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard for compatibility. Our memory choices represent an excellent blend of performance at today's inflated prices, although we are finally starting to see some price stabilization in the DDR2 market.

A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AnandTech testbed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. We highly recommend 2GB based upon the pending arrival of Microsoft Windows Vista, newly released games, and video encoding requirements at this time with H.264 standards. We are utilizing the MSI X1950XTX video card to ensure our 1280x1024 resolutions are not completely GPU bound for our memory test results. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at standard settings. Let's see how well our five choices faired and if the overclocking results reveal any surprises.



Memory Performance

We utilized Memtest86+ and our full benchmark test suite to optimize our DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 memory for both performance and stability. Our overclock settings represent how far we could overclock our memory modules with the best possible timings on the Gigabyte DS3 motherboard. These settings had to pass our full benchmark test suite and not just the applications that we are showing today. The results on other chipsets such as the Intel 975X or NVIDIA nForce 590SLI can and will be different due to chipset timings and memory SPD compatibility. Our test results utilizing the GEIL DDR2-800 memory from our P965 roundup are listed at the bottom of the chart for comparison.

Click to enlarge

The results are somewhat surprising with the A-DATA DDR2-667 memory reaching DDR2-970 at 5-5-5-18 timings. This represents a 45% increase in memory speed that only required an increase in voltage to 2.2V. We were able to POST and enter Windows XP at DDR2-1000 with this memory but it was not stable enough to complete our benchmarks. Our PQI Turbo DDR2-667 memory was able to reach DDR-940 with 2.2V resulting in a fairly impressive 41% overclock at 5-5-5-15 timings.

The Transcend JetRam DDR2-667 and G.Skill DDR2-667 were both able to reach DDR2-910. This represents a 36% overclock and is what we expected out of our memory choices on average. The Transcend JetRam memory was listed at $76 per 1GB module at ZipZoomFly when we purchased ours, reminding us of the "good old days". We did a last minute check today and it is sold out now. However, if you can find this memory in stock then buy it as it offers the best price to performance ratio of our test candidates today.

There are never any guarantees in overclocking and our Corsair Value Ram represents this premise. We could not get the memory to run at DDR2-800 at the 4:5 ratio and could only reach DDR2-750 in our overclocking results. This required a change to 5-6-5-18 timings that resulted in performance just slightly better than our stock DDR2-800 settings. We have seen the same results on our AM2 systems so beware that this memory runs at its advertised settings and not much more.

Our GEIL DDR2-800 memory was only able to reach DDR2-910 (7x455FSB) due to the Micron D9 1GB issue that has been plaguing the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard. We are glad to report that Gigabyte has identified this issue and hopefully will have a new BIOS available in the near future. Our GEIL DDR2-800 memory reached DDR2-1040 (7x520FSB) on our Asus P5B-E 1.02G motherboard so we know it has the capability to overclock further than our DDR2-667 selections. However, this only represents a 30% overclock of the memory compared to our ability to overclock most of the DDR2-667 selections from 36% to 45%.

Overall, our DDR2-667 memory selections, sans the Corsair Value Ram, performed admirably and scored within a single percent of our much more expensive DDR2-800 memory at stock settings. On our P965 motherboards we generally see that system performance at DDR2-667 memory speeds with timings around 4-4-3-10 or better is perfectly acceptable. Due to improved overall system performance we still recommend DDR2-800 memory speeds with timings at 4-4-4-12 or better when not overclocking the system. The difference in timings between 4-4-3-12 and 3-4-3-9 at DDR2-800 is negligible and in our opinion is not worth the extra cost. We would have to recommend the purchase of the Transcend memory based upon our results as their price to performance ratio cannot be beat in this category. We will present budget DDR2-533 and DDR2-800 memory results in the near future.

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