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Test System
For this review I'll be
using the Asus P5AD2 Premium motherboard based on Intel's 925X Express
chipset. I have only had this board for a few days, but I'm very
impressed with it. Asus has allowed the option to change the
multiplier on the 3.4 and 3.6 CPU's to 14. This allows a much
higher front side bus to be achieved and is perfect for testing high
speed RAM.
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Hardware |
Model |
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Motherboard: |
Asus P5AD2 Premium |
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CPU: |
Intel Pentium 4
3.4GHz (800MHz)
LGA-775 |
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Video Card: |
MSI X600XT-PCIE |
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Memory: |
OCZ
DDR2 PC2-5400
CL=4-4-4-12 |
Testing &
Overclocking
I'll be using SiSoft
Sandra and Super Pi for the benchmarks today. As far as settings
goes, I'll be testing the memory at the rated speed of 667Mhz at the
default settings of 4-4-4-12. I will then tighten the timings up
as far as I can and retest. We will also overclock the memory as
far as we can using all the memory voltage the board will allow and
relaxed timings. We want to get the most out of this memory.
Before we get to the results let's find out how much we could get out of
the memory. Using the option in the BIOS to lower the multiplier
to 14, I was able to push the front side bus up to 266MHz. Using
the memory ratio of 3:4 that put the memory up to 710MHz. I
lowered the memory multiplier to 1:1 and increased the front side bus to
275MHz to make sure the memory was stopping me and not the CPU.
The CPU has been tested up to 4GHz, so we can tell that the memory is
topping out at 710 and not any of the other system components.
710MHz was achieved by leaving the voltage to auto and the timings at
4-4-4-12. Manually setting the voltage to 2.1v or loosening the
timings did not increase the maximum overclock of the ram. 710MHz
was the highest I could get. Not that I'm disappointed.
710Mhz is the fastest I've ever seen memory go. Let's see how much
the loose timings effects it though.
Sisoft Sandra
Professional 2004.10.9.133
I've gotten memory scores
higher than this before, but it was at very tight timings and at a high
front side bus. Here we see the timings relaxed a lot so that we
could get the incredible MHz. As the technology and manufacturing
process becomes a little more refined, we're going to see some
incredible scores. I don't think that's very far off either.
As you can see from the graph above, I've already been able to tighten
the other timings to the acceptable levels of DDR500. The only
thing that is lagging behind is the CAS setting. It shouldn't be
hard to get that down to CAS 3 in the near future.
Super Pi
Super Pi scales very
nicely. As you can see the increased memory speed really effects
the score.
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