DDR2 Roundup: Reaching for 667 and Beyond

Corsair XMS2 5300C4PRO

Corsair is well known as a producer of Enthusiast memory, so it came as no surprise that Corsair is first to market with DDR2 memory rated as the next standard of PC-5300 or DDR2 667. The timing of Corsair's introduction, however, was a bit of a surprise, just two weeks after Intel's introduction of the new DDR2 technology. With the difficulty of getting DDR2 to market, DDR2 667 was not expected to appear so quickly - especially at the aggressive 4-4-4 timings rather than the JEDEC 667 timings of 5-5-5.

Test DIMMs were a matched pair of XMS2 PRO with the activity LEDs.

We first saw the LEDs in our review of Corsair XMS4000 PRO and again, in the review of Corsair DDR400 2-2-2 that was recently introduced. Corsair uses the PRO designation to indicate LED activity lights on the memory.

While Corsair did not reveal the manufacturer of the memory chips used in their new XMS2 667, we suspect that the memory is based on specially binned Micron DDR2 533 chips, which were introduced about two weeks ago. The performance across the board matches very closely to Micron and Crucial DDR2 memory tested in this roundup.

Test Results: Corsair XMS2 5300C4PRO

The full suite of benchmark tests were run at all memory speeds. This includes Quake3, Super PI, Sandra 2004 SP2 Memory Tests, Aida 32 Memory Tests, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein-Enemy Territory. We also ran UT2003, Aquamark 3, and Comanche 4 at every memory speed to verify stability of the reported memory timings. All benchmarks and additional tests had to complete without incident for the memory settings to be considered stable.

Corsair XMS2 5300C4PRO (DDR2 667) - 2 x 512Mb Double-Bank
Speed	Memory Timings & Voltage	Quake3 fps	Sandra UNBuffered	Sandra Standard Buffered	Super PI 2M places (time in sec)
533DDR 800FSB	3-3-3-10 1.85V	371.4	INT 3196 FLT 3232	INT 4944 FLT 4945	107
667DDR 1000FSB	4-4-4-10 1.85V	458.0	INT 3867 FLT 3898	INT 6170 FLT 6148	86
686DDR 258FSB	4-4-4-10 1.85V	471.7	INT 3979 FLT 4022	INT 6322 FLT 6305	83

Corsair XMS2 5300C4PRO (DDR2 667)
Speed	RCW-ET Radar	Aida 32 Read	Aida 32 Write	Aida 32 Total
533DDR 800FSB	78.4	5451	2280	7731
667DDR 1000FSB	97.5	6627	2770	9397
686DDR 258FSB	100.3	6836	2878	9714

Since there is no motherboard support at this time for a standard DDR2 667 memory, Corsair has programmed the SPD to 4-4-4-12 timings at DDR2 533. These are actually the rated timings for DDR2 667 performance. It is clear that XMS2 667 performs significantly better than 4-4-4 at 533, performing with faster 3-3-3 timings at 1.85V with no effort at the 533 speed. Corsair easily met the DDR 667 4-4-4 specifications at DDR2 667, at the same low voltage of 1.85V.

It is not surprising that the Corsair 667 had no problem running at the highest speed that the Abit AA8 currently supports at DDR2 686. Since this was accomplished at the same 4-4-4 timings and 1.85V, it certainly is logical to expect that the XMS2 667 is capable of even higher speeds than we can currently achieve on 925X motherboards.