Make Home Page
Add to Favorites
XbitLabs is using Twitter
Windows Live Alerts
Testbed and Methods
We will try to check how profitable it is to use DDR700 SDRAM in an Athlon 64 platform on a condition that you have to go for some serious concessions in terms of memory timings for the system to be stable in this mode. To perform this test session we took a system with an Athlon 64 FX-57 processor (2.8GHz default clock rate) and tested its performance at varying clock-gen and memory frequencies. At each memory frequency we chose the most aggressive timings that overclocker-friendly modules on Samsung TCCD and Winbond UTT chips permitted.
We took two pairs of modules from OCZ to perform our tests: OCZ EL DDR PC-4800 Dual Channel Platinum (on Samsung TCCD chips) and OCZ EL DDR PC-3500 Gold GX (on Winbond chips). The table below lists the tested modes:
CPU clock frequency | Clock generator | Resulting | Memory | Timings | Memory |
14x | 200 MHz | 2800 MHz | DDR400 | 2-2-2-10-1T | OCZ EL DDR |
13x | 215 MHz | 2795 MHz | DDR430 | 2-2-2-10-1T | |
12x | 233 MHz | 2796 MHz | DDR466 | 2-2-2-10-1T | |
11x | 255 MHz | 2805 MHz | DDR510 | 2.5-3-3-10-1T | OCZ EL DDR |
10x | 280 MHz | 2800 MHz | DDR560 | 2.5-4-4-10-1T | |
9x | 311 MHz | 2799 MHz | DDR622 | 3-4-4-10-1T | |
8x | 350 MHz | 2800 MHz | DDR700 | 3-5-5-10-2T |
As you see, the processor frequency is nearly the same in all the modes, so any variation in the system performance will only be due to the differences in the memory subsystem configuration.
The testbed was configured in the following way:
- AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 CPU (Socket 939, 2.8GHz, 1024KB L2 cache, San Diego core)
- DFI NF4 Ultra-D mainboard (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset)
- Memory modules:
- OCZ EL DDR PC4800 Dual Channel Platinum
- OCZ EL DDR PC3500 Gold GX
- PowerColor RADEON X800 XT graphics card (PCI-Express x16)
- Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150)
- Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2
Although the title product of this review, Patriot PDC1G5600ELK, doesn’t take part in these tests, the results will show us if DDR700 SDRAM is at all worth the trouble.
