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A hardware failure can be one of the most frustrating experiences you
will ever have with your performance PC. The way your manufacturer
handles the warranty and RMA is often a great measure of whether you
should do business with them. Today our guest reviewer Joe, aka *WKS*ether.kill,
takes OCZ Technology to the table and comes back with a shiny new set of
Platinum series DDR. Of course it wouldn't be Club Overclocker if we
didn't push the new DDR to the limits! Come take a look.
*picture from ocztechnology.com
For a long time, I had been a die-hard fan of the OCZ PC4000 VX 512
modules, so much so, that I
ran 4 sticks of those beauties in a 250MHz 2-2-2-6-2T configuration. The downside to such
extreme performance was the high voltage that these required in order to
run, which, I suspect contributed to their short life.
Which brings me to OCZ’s RMA support department. OCZ uses an
interesting method for dealing with customer RMAs. If you suspect that
there is something wrong with your OCZ product, the first thing you need
to do is sign up for the
OCZ Support Forum.
When you first post with your problem, you are provided with a set of
fields to fill out detailing your system configuration. Then you can
post your symptoms, and OCZ staffers and other helpful folk will walk
you through troubleshooting your system. Once troubleshooting has
finished, and it is concluded that the OCZ product is the failure, then
you are invited to contact them via e-mail to receive an RMA number.
The few times that I have RMA’d product to OCZ, the turnaround time
seems to be around a week, from the day I shipped the parts out to the
day I received replacement.
When my VX died, the knowledgeable folks at the OCZ helped me to verify
my memory’s failure, and because they had no more VX in stock, they
offered to let me RMA all four sticks for a kit of the PC4000 EB
Platinum's. The beauty of this system is that anyone can search the
forum’s archives for troubleshooting tips, and the OCZ staffers will
even help you overclock your system. The forum’s staffers seem very
knowledgeable about what they do. So now, with new Platinum’s in hand,
what better opportunity to benchmark some new sticks of memory?
Specifications:
500MHz DDR
CL 3-3-2-8
Unbuffered
Mirrored Platinum Copper Heatsink
Lifetime Warranty
2.7 Volts
Special Features:
OCZ EVP (Extended Voltage Protection) is a feature that allows
performance enthusiasts to use a VDIMM of 2.9V ± 5% without invalidating
their OCZ Lifetime Warranty.
ULN (Ultra Low Noise) technology uses various printed circuit board (PCB)
techniques to reduce the amount of electrical noise that is present in
all high-speed ICs. This results in faster and more stable memory.
As you can see from these specifications, these modules are definitely
geared for the hardcore overclocking market. Lets see how they do,
shall we?
Test
setup:
|
Hardware |
Model |
|
Motherboard: |
DFI LanParty nF4 Ultra-D, 623 BIOS |
|
CPU: |
Opteron 170
2.75GHz, 10x275, 1.375Vx110%
XP-90 with 92mm Panaflo |
|
Video: |
eVGA 7800GTX with custom overclocking BIOS
486MHz core, 526MHz Geometry, 1320MHz
effective Memory |
|
Memory: |
OCZ Platinum EB PC4000 2x1GB |
|
Hard drives: |
2x36.6GB Raptor in RAID 0
120GB Samsung SP120
2x200GB Western Digital RAID 0 |
|
Power Supply: |
Antec NeoPower 480w |
|
Sound: |
X-Fi XtremeMusic |
|
O/S: |
Windows XP SP2 |
Method:
I started with the rated speeds advertised by OCZ, that being 3-3-2-8-1T
at 250MHz, using a 9:10 divider. My motherboard defaulted at 2.8V,
and that is what I used for all the testing. After I verified that
it was stable at this speed, using memtest and prime95, I then went
for the max, which is nothing short of astonishing. These sticks
went all the way up to 275 on the same timings, and not only that, I
was able to take Tras all the way down to 0. Just to be sure, I ran
these sticks at 275MHz 3-3-2-0 for 24 hours on memtest86 to make
sure that they were absolutely stable. I was even able to boot
these sticks into windows at an astonishing clock of 290 3-3-2-8
with 2.9V. To be sure, I was very impressed.
The 250MHz tests were done with the 9:10 divider, stock timings, 1T
command rate, and the advanced options were set to auto. The 275MHz
tests were run 1:1, at both 3-3-2-8 and 3-3-2-0 timings, also set to
1T command rate and Auto for the advanced options.
The major limiting factor for these tests is the fact that I could not
push my Opteron 170 past 2.75GHz, even with higher voltage. I did
some testing using the 9x multiplier to see if I can boot the memory
at higher speeds, and in fact, the memory seemed fairly stable up
to 285MHz 3-3-2-8. However, because of the lower CPU speed, and
thus, the lower speed of the memory controller, benchmarks were
negatively impacted, so I did not post them here.
3DMark game tests were excluded as all results were within the margin of
error.
All benchmarks were run three times, with the best score recorded, and
the system was rebooted in between each test suite.
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