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| OCZ EL PC3700/PC3500 Basic Series DDR |
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| Written by Alexandru Spataru | |
| Wednesday, 20 June 2007 | |
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Page 3 of 7
However, on Intel Pentium 4 motherboards which don't use dual channel, the RAM needs to be ran as fast as possible in order to take advantage of the huge bandwidth of the CPU. So DDR466 is really not too fast after all, as some might think. In case you wonder what EL-DDR is, here's the explanation. It is, in theory, a series of packaging and binning process improvements that allow reduced latency and higher speed operation than standard DDR SDRAM components.
Because OCZ have thinner TSOP chips than usual, this allows for a better heat dissipation, thus higher speed and more aggressive timings. And, of course, the PCB also uses the ULN technology. The module contains 4ns OCZ chips, but I was unable to take a picture of those; the clip is simply too strong and I couldn't remove the heat spreader. Now, for the testing part. Because these are high speed modules, I needed a fast chipset and I chose the nVIDIA nForce2, because not only can it handle DDR400 RAM, but can also set the RAM speed twice as fast the FSB speed. Here is the test system:
Strange thing is I can run FSB 200MHz as long as I keep the RAM set to 160MHz (DDR320), and I can also run the RAM at high speeds, above DDR466, as long as the FSB is under 185MHz. Unfortunately I could not modify the motherboard (a VDD mod would have helped I think, and better cooling as well) because that would have voided the warranty, so all performance tests were ran at FSB 166MHz. Since not all RAM takes aggressive timings well, I have defined two sets of timings that I will use during testing. First are the relaxed timings, which are default for most modules:
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 27 June 2007 ) |
