So here they are in all their beauty:

This kit is for who doesn’t want to chance his platform to a DDR2 ready one, but for who wants to have a sweet pc, to work and play perfectly with the latest games with! Who wants to update his platform waiting for Windows Vista must have 2GBs of memories, we all already know the amout of memory that the new Windows will need…

Let’s take a closer look at the chip: we can see that this kit is equipped with Infineon 5ns (remarked by AENEON)

Let’s spend a few words on this kit’s esthetical, since on it is mounted the new Mushkin’s heat-spreader which we all think looks beauty and they work perfectly too, since even with 3.2V going though this memories they keep them pretty cool (we recommend at least a 80mm fan on them anyway)

Specs:

* Part Number:  991434

* Package : 2048MB kit (2x1024MB) 128M x 64

* CAS Latency : 2-3-2-6 (PC3200)

* Test Voltage : 2.6~2.8 V

* Speed : DDR 400 MHZ (PC3200)

* Type : 184 DDR SDRAM

* Error Checking : Non-ECC

* Registered/Unbuffered : Unbuffered

* Quality Control :Comprehensive rigorously tested in pair at dual channel environment

* Warranty : Lifetime

We’ve got to consider this kit in the middle/high level class, and the price is aliened with its performance… on mushkin website we can find them around 220$.

Config & Tests:

CPU: Opteron 146 & Venice 3200+ Cooled by Xp90-c

RAM: Mushkin 2x1gb kit DDR400

Motherboard: Dfi Ultra-d nforce 4

PSU: Sylverstone Zeus 650Watt

Vga: Sapphire X850XT

All the tests where made with three different voltage tensions: 2.6V (to simulate the daily use); 2.8V (to simulate a heavy daily use); and 3.2V (to simulate a benchmark use, and to analyse the behaviour of this memories with the gain of volts.)

For the Super-Pi tests were made two of them: 1MB to find the last MHz, and 32MB.

Looking at the Timings that we can change (generally from the Advanced Chipset Features menu  in the motherboards bios), just four of them are the ones more used:

* CAS Latency (Tcl): refers to the length of time, in clock cycles, it takes for a request sent from the memory controller to read a memory location and send it to the module's output pins. Lower values means higher performance. Obviously a Cas 3 implies different performance if the memory works at 166MHz or 200MHz!

*  RAS to CAS Delay (Trcd): the dates in the memories moduleds are disposed and read in raw and column, starting from the firsts lines and then from the columns. The TRCD means the delay in clock cycles between the RAS signal and the CAS one. Lower values means higher performances.

* RAS Pre-charge Time (Trp): this value refers to the length of time, in clock cycles, between a RAS command the the next one. In this length of time the condensators of the memories are pre-charged. This operation is indispensable for the DRAM characteristic we told before.  Obviously lower values means higher performances.

* Cycle Time (Tras): refers to the length of time, in clock cycles, it takes to capture the date from the memory and making it avaible for the output. Lower values means higher performance.

The timings were set up by bios are in this order:

CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS.

Conclusions:

This kit fully satisfied our expectations, it’s a very good kit of memory for who wants to remain faithful do DDR1, but in the meanwhile loves to have a little fun with some overclocking, since relaxing the timings this kit has got a nice overclock range (we are talking of 30%ca.)!

About the voltage, this kit respond fine with its gain, we can see a clearly improvement going from 2.6V to 2.8V…but when we exceed and we get it to 3.2V at least in our case it has not given a clearly performances’ boost.

We remained satisfied from this kit, since they behave as we expected. The price is adapted to their performances.

We have to thanks Mushkin e Sirious Computer who gave us the opportunity to tests this kit.