OCZ EL DDR PC-4800 Platinum Elite Review

Name: OCZ EL DDR PC-4800 Platinum Elite
Brand: OCZ

W1zzard

on Sep 4th, 2005,

in Memory.

Manufacturer: OCZ

Value and Conclusion »

Test Setup

Test System
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 3000+ Venice
Motherboard:	DFI LanParty NF4 UT
Memory:	2x 512 MB OCZ EL DDR PC-4800EL Platinum Elite
Video Card:	ATI Radeon X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor Diamondmax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC PurePower 475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.8

OCZ says the memory modules have been tested to run at 2T. We tested only at 1T since this is where the performance is. Why would you buy an "Elite" memory, and not run it at the fastest setting?

Performance

The first test we did, was test how the memory performs at a stock frequency of 200 FSB. We tested both 2-2-2-5 and 2.5-4-4-10 timings. Here you can clearly see how big the performance difference between both timings is.
After this, we tested how far we could overclock the memory at 2.6V. The CL2 timings could only go 6 MHz faster, to 206 MHz, which is not much. However, at CL2.5 the overclocking increase was substantial, at 2.6V, which is 0.2V below OCZ's recommended default voltage, we could gain an extra 45 MHz.
Now we increased voltage in several steps to 2.8V, 3.1V and 3.3V. More voltage does not help the CL2 setting at all which is a bit dissapointing. The lowered maximum clock at 3.3V seems to be caused by the extra heat generated of the memory - we did not use any active cooling.
At CL2.5 the results are completely different, overclocks scale nicely with voltage. The maximum of 282 MHz at 3.3V is quite good.

The last test "JEDEC DDR-400A" is for comparison with a generic DDR module running at JEDEC standard timings.

OCZ EL DDR PC-4800EL Platinum Elite
CPU Clock & Memory Ratio	Memory Speed	Memory Timings	Everest Read	Everest Write	Everest Latency	Quake 3 Timedemo	3DMark 2001SE	SuperPi Mod 1M
9 x 200 1:1	200 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.6V	5345 MB/s	1999 MB/s	45.2 ns	247.3 FPS	21001	45.77 s
9 x 206 1:1	206 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.6V	5413 MB/s	2011 MB/s	45.5 ns	251.5 FPS	21150	44.92 s
9 x 206 1:1	206 MHz	2-2-2-5 2.8V	5413 MB/s	2011 MB/s	45.5 ns	251.5 FPS	21150	44.92 s
9 x 206 1:1	206 MHz	2-2-2-5 3.1V	5413 MB/s	2011 MB/s	45.5 ns	251.5 FPS	21150	44.92 s
9 x 198 1:1	198 MHz	2-2-2-5 3.3V	5276 MB/s	1982 MB/s	45.6 ns	243.9 FPS	20646	46.28 s
9 x 200 1:1	200 MHz	2.5-4-4-10 2.6V	5145 MB/s	1986 MB/s	53.7 ns	240.7 FPS	19992	46.77 s
9 x 245 1:1	245 MHz	2.5-4-4-10 2.6V	6303 MB/s	2296 MB/s	43.8 ns	293.6 FPS	23614	38.27 s
9 x 260 1:1	260 MHz	2.5-4-4-10 2.8V	6819 MB/s	2461 MB/s	41.3 ns	312.0 FPS	24723	36.02 s
9 x 275 1:1	275 MHz	2.5-4-4-10 3.1V	7084 MB/s	2541 MB/s	39.2 ns	329.2 FPS	26036	34.30 s
9 x 282 1:1	282 MHz	2.5-4-4-10 3.3V	7245 MB/s	2715 MB/s	37.5 ns	337.8 FPS	26421	33.27 s
JEDEC DDR-400A	200 MHz	2.5-3-3-8 2.6V	5246 MB/s	2197 MB/s	50.6 ns	243.4 FPS	20355	46.22 s

Running this memory at CL2 timings does not make much sense in my opinion, since your overclocks are rather limited there. You specifically buy TCCD memory for high clocks at less aggressive timings. If you want tight timings you should look at memory which uses Winbond's BH-5 chips, for example OCZ's 3500 Gold Gamer eXtreme.

For easier comparison with other modules, we set a maximum voltage of 3.1V and tested until we found the highest clock frequency and fastest timings for this memory. The benchmarks Everest Read, Everest Write and Quake 3 were run. We then calculated the performance increase in percent compared to some standard DDR-400 memory running at JEDEC standard timings (2.5-3-3-8). The average percentage of the three benchmarks is listed in following table: