OCZ DDR PC-3500EL Gold Gamer eXtreme Edition GX Review
Here at the club OCZ Technology has become synonymous with
high performance for your PC. We have raved about their power supplies and
drooled over their lightning fast DDR2 modules. Now OCZ has provided us
with a set of their award winning Extreme-Speed Gold Performance DDR sticks to
put to the test. Lets see what they can do.
Over the
years, OCZ has built up a great reputation for quality and their name is
synonymous with performance. The EL in the name stands for Enhanced
Latency. The Gold refers to not just the color of the shiny gold layered
copper heat sinks, it also refers to the gold standard OCZ uses to denote the
level of the memory in their performance line. OCZ PC-3500 Gold GX
products are 100% hand-tested to ensure compliance with stringent quality
standards. In addition, each member of the OCZ Gold GX family is encased in a
gold layered copper heatspreader for efficient heat dissipation and is backed by
an industry-leading lifetime warranty, toll-free technical support and the
exclusive EVP® (Extended Voltage Protection) coverage, a feature allowing
performance enthusiasts to tweak their systems up to a VDIMM of 3.1V ± 5%
without invalidating their OCZ Lifetime Warranty!
The finish is mirror shiny and shows every fingerprint.
Our PC-3500 runs at 2.8 V with a blistering bus speed of 433MHz DDR. The timings are a
dramatic 2-2-2-5 (CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS) some of the lowest out of the box latency
available on the market.
Specifications:
Special Features:
Part Numbers:
* OCZ EVP® (Extended Voltage Protection) is a feature
that allows performance enthusiasts to use a VDIMM of 3.1V ± 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.
The install:
I installed the OCZ EL DDR PC-3500
Gold onto my
Soltek N4Pro 939
motherboard. The install included: a
Kingwin Aquastar water-cooling kit, an AMD Athlon 3000+, a
Connect 3d X700 Pro, a Maxtor 80G, and a Lite-on 16x DVD Burner; all
mounted in a
XION II PC Gamers Case.
The BIOS
auto detects the DDR settings. From The CAS latency detected at 2.5, I can
already see the RAM is not detecting correctly.
Using
CPU-Z, I
confirm the OCZ memory is detecting at 2.5-3-3-7. Back to the BIOS we go.
Switching the Timing to
manual allows the correct settings to be assigned. The Soltek BIOS does not go
any lower than 2-2-2-5 and will not allow the Memory clock to go over 200MHz,
making this the fastest RAM it will take. A little creative clock manipulation
gets us up to the 215MHz we need
With the correct settings in the BIOS, CPU-Z shows the above
settings. With no newer BIOS available, we will have to trust the
settings.
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