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OCZ EL PC3700/PC3500 Basic Series DDR |
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Written by Alexandru Spataru
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Wednesday, 20 June 2007 |
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Page 4 of 7
And now for the AIDA32 readings, first the PC3500 module:
This is weird, AIDA actually displays this module as being a standard PC2700 stick, with CAS 2.5 at DDR333 and CAS 2 at DDR266. Strange, I am sure it is a bug in either AIDA or the nForce2 BIOS, or both. This module, on a Intel i845PE motherboard, is displayed as being DDR433 CAS 2.5 and supports CAS 2.0 at DDR400. The PC3700 EL DDR module readings:
Same thing here, AIDA thinks this is a PC2700 module that supports CAS 2.5 at DDR455!?! and CAS2 at DDR455 at the same time. Again, the same AIDA as well as CPU-Z display the module as DDR466 CAS 2.5 on the i845PE motherboard. I guess the nForce2 BIOS needs some more work. After all the small problems have been worked out (the nForce2 chipset has been nothing but a pain in since I first came in contact with it), I started to run some benches.
As I said, I ran all benches at DDR333 but with different timings, to see which stick performs best without overclocking and also to see if this Enhanced Latency is for real or just another marketing trick. There are a few benchmarks that are really sensitive about the memory speed and timings, and these benches are SiSoft Sandra, PCMark 2002, Quake3 and even 3DMark 2001SE. I've also tried UT2003 and 3DMark03, but the difference between the scores of the two modules were almost non-existent. First is SiSoft Sandra, a great benchmark to measure the memory bandwidth:
As expected, aggressive timings will buy you a few dozen MB/s in Sandra, which is good. I think the SPD on the PC3700 EL DDR module is programmed with more aggressive timings to begin with, but when I set the timings to manual I still get a difference between the PC3500 and PC3700 modules, thus I conclude that Enhanced Latency is not just a marketing trick; it really makes a small difference. PCMark is not quite a benchmark for gamers and overclockers, but rather for office users. Still, it does a pretty good job evaluating the CPU, memory and HDD performance for office applications.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 27 June 2007 )
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