For the next wave of benchmarks, I'm going to lean of my old friend 3D Mark 06.  While the benchmark routines may be synthetic in nature, this will give a very graphic representation on just how much impact the memory bus can have on the total systems performance. Keep in mind, ONLY the memory bus speed has changed, the CPU front side bus and RAW clock speed did not change throughout the entire spectrum of benchmarking. Let's have a look.

DDR2-800 (400Mhz actual)

Frames per second breakdown

DDR2-866 (433Mhz actual)

Frames per second breakdown

DDR2-933 (466 actual)

Frames per second breakdown

     Conclusion......

     99.9% of the time, you get what you pay for, and this is one of those times. 2 Gigabyte RAM modules have always been expensive for the obvious reason - their size. Until lately, that is all they had going for them as most 2GB modules had incredibly high latency or were plagued with motherboard compatibility issues. Focusing on the now, there has never been a better time to upgrade. Sure, Intel is about to usher us towards DDR3, but I'm sure most of you can remember the turnover period that DDR2 had. DDR2 will continue to dominate in raw performance due to its lower latency for quite some time. Then factor in the availability and price of present DDR2 modules and we begin to see the same picture that DDR2 originally painted for us, all those years ago. It will be a little while yet before DDR3 is ready to completely takeover the desktop market.

     Which puts a very bright spotlight on the Vista Performance Dual Channel memory upgrade kit from OCZ,  unless of course you've already jumped off of the DDR2 ship. Sitting in the Platinum series puts these modules ahead of a few other OCZ offerings which explains, looking back at the numbers, why this set has a very good overclocking potential. Since most motherboards now support DDR2-800 , and taking into consideration that we are Overclcokers, that kind of headroom is exactly what we want. The SiSoftware Sandra numbers are a good reference, and they keyed on on just how high we could push the modules. It all comes together looking at the 3D Mark 06 results. Keeping in mind, the ONLY thing that changed was the memory bus speed. This is a free feather in the hat for any Overclocking looking to squeeze every bit of performance possible from their system.

Innovation:	9.0 out of 10
Performance:	9.5 out of 10
Quality:	10 out of 10
Stability:	10 out of 10
Overclocking:	10 out of 10
Software/Drivers Pack:	N/A
Value:	9.5 out of 10
Overall Rating 9.5
Project Skill Level (10 being most difficult)	4 out of 10