Test Setup

Performance

The first test we did, was test how the memory performs at a stock frequency of 200 FSB with the default timings recommended by OCZ.

We expected that timings could not be tightened much, god were we wrong. The best we could get at 1.8V was 3-3-2-4. Maximum overclock at this setting was DDR2-450. This sounds like a good setting for air cooled P4's. Many CPUs max out at around 270 FSB with air cooling, tweak the latencies and run memory and FSB 1:1 for a nice performance boost. To see how much you gain from tightening the latencies, we ran a benchmark series with those latencies at DDR2-400, for direct comparison with the first test.

Back at default timings, we increased the memory clock step by step to find out what the maximum clocks are when running at the default voltage of 1.8V. We were amazed to see how fast this memory did go. We reached completely stable speeds of DDR2-743. That's a huge overclock, especially for a memory which is geared towards "mainstream desktop users" with a "lower price point".

Interesting, that increasing the memory voltage does not help the maximum overclock. At 2.0 V we reached DDR2-743 again. At 2.1 V and 2.15 V there was a minor frequency increase to DDR2-750. Everything above 2.15 V, made the memory unstable, above 2.3 V it did not even POST. Please note that this memory does not have OCZ's Enhanced Voltage Warranty, but you don't need it anyways with such great overclocking at stock voltage.

The last test "JEDEC DDR2-400" is for comparison with a generic DDR2 module running at JEDEC standard timings.


Relaxing the timings does not make any sense at all, the maximum overclock has enough headroom. Less agressive timings, will just reduce performance.



Base performance looks good. Overclocking does give you the extra performance you would expect.

For easier comparison with other modules, we set a maximum voltage of 2.1V 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. Usually we use 2.2V for this comparison, but since the memory does not run stable at 2.2V we used 2.1V. We then calculated the performance increase in percent compared to some standard DDR2-400 memory running at JEDEC DDR2-400 (4-4-4-12). The average percentage of the three benchmarks is listed in following table: