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Kingston PC3200 ValueRAM 1024MB |
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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Wednesday, 20 June 2007 |
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Page 2 of 2
I used a Biostar M7NCG nForce2 all-in-one mATX motherboard. Granted, it's not an overclocker's dream, but being the broke college student that I am it's the only board I have access to. Furthermore, few enthusiasts would pay a premium for top-of-the-line components only to skimp on the RAM. I was able to get the memory to post at some pretty impressive settings: 2-3-2-1 at a maximum allowed voltage of 2.8V. Unfortunately that's where the excitement ended. I had to bump them back up significantly to even boot into Windows.
Modest timing reductions were fine in "normal" conditions and even during certain memory benchmarks, but once multitasking took hold and Doom 3 fired up, instability quickly followed. At the end of the second day of trying out almost every possible combination I gave up and set it back to spec. That's not to say this memory won't overclock at all; it just refused to do so on my motherboard. For the curious, here's the test system used:
- AXP 1700+ JIUHB DLT3C 1.5v (11x133 = 1466mhz) @ 11x166 (1833mhz) 1.5v
- Biostar M7NCG nForce2 motherboard
- 2x256MB PC3200 Crucial DDR400
- 2x512MB PC3200 Kingston ValueRAM DDR400
- Gainward GeForce3 Ti200
- Onboard audio and LAN
- Western Digital 1000JB SE 100GB HDD (internal)
- Lite-On 16X DVD drive
- Pioneer DVR-108 16X DVD burner
- Mitsumi FDD
- 2x 12" blue CCFLs
- 4x 80mm fans
- 1x 60mm fan
I'd say this is a budget setup, perfect for budget memory. For testing I used Quake 3 Arena, Cachemem 2.65, SuperPI 1.1, and SiSoft Sandra's memory bandwidth benchmark. I didn't graph Quake 3 because it showed absolutely no difference between the two memory brands even at 800x600 resolution, leading me to believe that it was still limited by the video card.
Cachemem showed almost no difference between the two. Kingston's ValueRAM was actually a bit slower here even though its latency is lower than Crucial's. However, both results are within 1% of each other, so there's really no practical difference.
SuperPI calculations to 1 million, 2 million, and 4 million digits once again showed next to no difference between the various memories.
Last but not least, Sandra confirmed all the other tests: no real difference between the Kingston and Crucial memories. Crucial seems to edge ahead once again, but only by a hair (if that). So what can you take out of this? For a budget system, Kingston's ValueRAM is a solid reliable choice - you can't beat lifetime warranty. From personal experience, I've never been disappointed by any Kingston products. How good it overclocks (if at all) is yet to be revealed, but it's not something that should be expected of ValueRAM. Price wise, it'll run you about the same as standard offerings from any of the other major companies, so it may well boil down to personal preference.
Pros
- Good packaging
- High quality
- Lifetime warranty
- Low price
Cons
- Little overclocking headroom (at least with my motherboard)
Kingston's ValueRAM series is just that: high quality, stable memory that runs perfectly at its rated speed. Couple that with a lifetime warranty and you have a viable option when looking for budget memory. It's possible (and likely) that some degree of overclocking can be achieved, but doing so would void your warranty and may or may not be successful.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 20 June 2007 )
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