Test Setup

Please note: When using P965 motherboards like the ASUS P5B with the OCZ PC2-6400 Crossfire memory, make sure to set Write to Precharge to 11, 12 or 13. The manual timing settings in the BIOS default to 10 which is too fast for this memory. When I tried the memory with Write to Precharge at 10 I saw very low clock rates, also the maximum stable frequency got lower after 2.05V. However, the SPD "Auto" setting in the BIOS worked correctly.

Performance

As always, the first test is how the memory performs at the standard frequency of 400 MHz, with standard voltage of 1.8V. The second and third tests are at 400 MHz too, but with different timings of CL5 and CL3. Here you can easily see how much difference changing the timings makes.

Now we tried to relax the timings to CL5, to find out what the maximum frequency is at these timings. DDR2-960 is quite impressive for a memory which is advertised as DDR2-800.

The next four tests show how well the memory performs at standard CL4 timings over a wide range of voltages from 1.8V to 2.1V. I think it is important to note here that the minimum voltage required to run DDR2-800 at CL4 is more than the standard voltage of 1.8V.

What if you don't need extremely high MHz, but want good timings? We tested how far the timings could be tightened. We could reach 3-3-2-4 which is almost the fastest setting the chipset allows. While the clocks are not very high, they can still be useful for a Pentium 4 rig that is running at 1:1 memory ratio.





With this new graph we are showing how well the memory maximum operating frequency responds to increased voltages. CL3 was not tested at below 2.0V, because the clock rates would be too low to make any sense.