Among PC enthusiasts, overclocking has become second nature as hitting the power button. Whether it's extreme overclock that swings for the fence or just a mild bump to the front side bus, overclocking has become very routine and is very accessible, and not just for the enthusiast either.  Assembling a PC has become much less daunting that it once was, and we're beginning to see a lot more novices take to the hobby. Heck, we all had to start somewhere - but the start that a PC hobbyist has today is far less intimidating than the early days that most of us had to deal with.

     Here's a quick look at the specs for the test rig. A machine that should be able to answer the call of any current PC game.

     Motherboard: Asus Striker Extreme
     CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo Xeon 3060
     Hard Drive: Western Digital Raptor X
     Video Cards: 2x EVGA 8800GTX in SLI configuration
     Sound Card: Soundblaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro Edition 

     Testing.......

     I'm going to test the memory with it's advertised latency timings and voltages, starting at 800 Mhz. From there, I'll move up the Megahertz scale testing each of the memory bus speeds that the Asus Striker will allow. Since the 680i chipset allows me to adjust the memory bus independently from the CPU bus, the CPU speed will remain at a constant throughout the test. However, the 680i chipset's memory dividers do have "sweet spots" that tend to yield better performance, so as always - results on your own individual machines many vary.

     First let me say, that these tests were conducted after system stability was 100% guaranteed. With that being said, the modules were able to ramp up from their DDR2-800 baseline to an incredible DDR2-933 without increasing voltage or adjusting the latency timings. With that being said, as I mentioned before, there were memory speeds that (to me) stood out as being more efficient than others. Of course, the top maximum 466 posted good numbers, but in its speed class, so did the 433 memory speed. Sandra gave us a good theoretical look at how we can expect this memory to perform,  but now I want to break it down to something most gamers can relate to - Frames per second.