X-bit labs

Memory Market Overview: April 2005

Category: Memory

by Anna Filatova

[ 04/07/2005 | 09:24 PM ]

This month we will pay most attention to the situation in the memory chips market, the pricing and the company shares there. Also, we will certainly mention the latest achievements in the memory technology development and try to predict what the coming spring is going to bring us.

Table of contents:

Since spring came, the memory module manufacturers have become very active. We get the impression that all of them were in a hurry to present to the public their new “spring fashions”. Ahead of all is again OCZ Technologies, which is hardly news to any of you, I assume, as this company is known for their largest variety of memory module product lines. In March they not only updated most of their product lines having announced new models, but also introduced a completely new product line.

This new product line is called Titanium, which major attraction is the reliability and not the performance characteristics, like in many other solutions from OCZ. I have actually already mentioned it in our News. They claim that all memory modules manufactured under this brand name will be tested manually and the chips will be selectively sorted out on the assembly stage. Moreover, they also offer their enhanced brand name PowerSwap warranty. Of course, the performance characteristics haven’t been left out of the question, at least the first representatives of the new product family, 512MB and 1GB PC3200 and PC2-5400 memory modules will support Enhanced Latency (EL).

However, the true Enhanced Latency was introduced in the new reincarnation of PC-3200 EL Gold Edition, which has now acquired better latencies. Now this formula looks as follows: 2-2-2-5, and this is with the standard 2.6V voltage! By the way, this part of OCZ’s activity starts looking more and more attractive, because it allows increasing the system performance significantly without pumping up the working frequencies and voltages.

As for overclocking-friendly solutions, Platinum Edition is what is traditionally targeted for this market segment. In March OCZ released a PC-4800 EL Platinum Limited Edition with 2.5-4-4-10 timings and voltage raised to 3V. As you probably know, the regular PC-4800 EL Platinum Edition memory modules boast CAS 3 and not CAS 2.5.