Installation took a bit longer as the heatshield/LED sandwich makes the module a bit thicker. A little squeezing and tight manuevering was needed to get it installed into our test system.
Here's the test bed:
- Abit IC-7 Motherboard
- P4 2.4C (capable of 266FSB)
- Abit GF4-ti4200
- Maxtor 8MB 7200RPM 80GB hard drive
- Windows XP Professional SP1
The XL3200 Pro package came as a matched pair, perfect for dual channeling at 2X512MB. We set the BIOS on the IC-7 to lock in a 1:1 ratio, which provides the maximum performance. The game accelerator option was set to A-A-A-D-D. CPU voltage was set to 1.6V and memory voltage was set to 2.8V.
As soon as the system booted up, it greeted us with some flashy lights.
Our first test is to see how well it performs at the stock speed of 400Mhz. We set our memory timings accordingly in the BIOS.
We tested using Sisoft Sandra, PCMark2002 and PiFast. At stock 400Mhz:
Sisoft Sandra 04 memory test:
|
Sisoft Sandra 04 Buffered |
( 200 / 400 ) |
| Int |
4842 MB/s |
| Float |
4811 MB/s |
PiFast calculator:
|
PiFast |
Time |
Digits: 10000000
Method: Chudnovsky
Size of FFT: 1024 |
52.81 seconds |
PCMark 2002 memory:
|
PCMark02 |
Score |
| Memory |
8434 |
These marks are very respectable at 400Mhz. But we want more of course, so we did a bit of CPU bus speed bumping until it crashed. At 2-2-2-5, we could raise it and boot at 212FSB (DDR424), but it never made it into Windows XP successfully. At 206FSB, it made it in and was able to run a few benches. But honestly, 206 really sucks, so we made a change in the memory timings to 2.5-3-3-6. Changed the FSB on the CPU to 250 and rebooted. Instant gratification, DDR500 rock stable into Windows.
Here are some results:
|
Sisoft Sandra 04 Buffered |
( 250 / 500 ) |
| Int |
6011 MB/s |
| Float |
5972 MB/s |
PiFast calculator:
|
PiFast |
Time |
Digits: 10000000
Method: Chudnovsky
Size of FFT: 1024 |
43.00 seconds |
PCMark 2002 memory:
|
PCMark02 |
Score |
| Memory |
10596 |
Oh yeah, 6GB/s territory in memory bandwidth!
We did a bit more testing at 3-4-4-8 at higher CPU bus speeds, but that did not fair too well when compared to the tighter timing of 2.5-3-3-6 at 250FSB.
So what's the verdict? Simply, get this if you want stable and top notch performance coming out of your dual channel capable motherboard. This TwinX1024 XL3200 Pro not only gives you some bandwidth power at stock and overclocked speeds, it also comes with heatshields equipped with some snazzy activity LEDs. Another great product from the folks at Corsair.
