This week OCZ Technologies and GeIL have announced their new memory modules that can provide 3.5GB/s peak memory subsystem bandwidth. Both companies follow the traditions of DDR SDRAM memory branding and call such memory “PC3500”. Of course, such kind of device has nothing to do with JEDEC and official standards, however, companies that sell their products to overclockers usually call their devices following JEDEC’s nomenclature in order to compare their innovative memory modules with existing solutions. A week ago Corsair was first to announce their so-called “PC3500” products (see this news-story).

Those devices that are announced today are also made using special design of PCBs and special memory chips, however, both OCZ and GeIL use copper heat-spreaders on their products, while Corsair utilise those made of aluminium. In fact, I can hardly believe that heat-spreaders made of copper are really needed for system memory; I assume that heat-spreaders made on aluminium are quite enough for such kind of devices.

Besides the core-clock, memory timings and some other adjustments can also influence the performance of the whole system, what we proved in our “Corsair XMS3200 DDR400 Memory Module Review”. As for the timings of the newly revealed devices, GeIL declares them as "2-3-3-6-1" (CAS Latency - RAS Precharge - RAS-to-CAS Delay - RAS Active to Precharge - Command Rate), while OCZ only tells us that CAS Latency value is 2, without revealing the remaining figures. Just for comparison, the formula of Corsair’s module is "2-4-4-8-1", hence, theoretically, their device is a bit slower compared to the GeIL’s.

OCZ and GeIL do not indicate whether their modules are able to work in pairs or not. Since Corsair says that such devices cannot function when there are installed more than one of them, I think that the new products have the same shortcoming.