Value RAM Roundup: Computing On a Budget
by Wesley Fink on April 11, 2005 4:26 PM EST- Posted in
- Memory
Final Words
"And the winner is..." really depends on how you plan to use your Value RAM. Some buyers ask nothing more than that their memory run at stock DDR400 speed as specified. If that buyer is you, then any of the seven memories that we tested here will meet your needs. All 7 of them ran at their specification or better without any problems at all. We would suggest that the CAS 2.5 memories are a bit faster and cost about the same as the Cas 3 we tested. Great choices here are the Kingston KVR400X64C3AK2/1G and the Transcend JM366D643A-50. 1 Gigabyte of either memory costs about $100 and they are sometimes on sale for even less. The Transcend is rated at CAS 2.5. The Kingston KVR400X64C3AK2/1G is rated at CAS 3, but we had no problem at all running the Kingston at CAS 2.5 at DDR400.The Kingston and Transcend stop at DDR450, and if your budget can stretch $21 to $121 for a Gigabyte of memory, the excellent OCZ PC3200 Premier will give you CAS 2.5 performance all the way up to around DDR480. This will cover the highest 1:1 overclock that you are likely to achieve with air cooling on any AMD Athlon 64 CPU. If your budget can stretch to around $195, you can buy famous Winbond BH5 again in OCZ PC3200 Gold. This will give you the absolute fastest 2-2-2 timings at DDR400 at default voltage - and a whole lot more if you want to overclock now or in the future. 2-2-2 timings are definitely faster, but we would choose a faster CPU over the faster RAM, if that is what the $95 represents in your budget, and you don't plan to overclock.
If you have any overclocking plans at all, exclude the other Kingston memory, Kingston KVR400X64C25/512, and Mushkin EM. They both had trouble even reaching a CPU clock of 205 on our test platform. There are much better choices for overclocking in this roundup. This may be a compatibility issue of these memory chips with the AMD on-chip memory controller or the DFI motherboard, but whatever the reason, they don't clock even modestly on our test bed. There are other choices available from both Kingston and Mushkin, and almost any choice will likely do better at overclocking than these two.
Last, we get to the Mad Overclockers category, or maybe the mad overclocker wannabes. There is an old southern saying that you can't make a sow's ear into a silk purse - another way to say, you can't get something for nothing. Two memories in this roundup challenge that old sage - OCZ PC3200 Gold or "Value BH5" and OCZ PC3200 Value Series or "Value VX". If you can supply the voltage, then these two memories will reward you with 2-2-2 performance all the way from DDR490 to DDR510. Considering that the king of 2-2-2, OCZ PC4000 VX, sells for about $270, these 2 memories are true bargains at $115 for Value VX or $195 for Value BH5. They will neither likely reach quite as far as 4000 VX, but they will come close. VX itself is still a great value at $270 when you compare its performance to other memories in the $250 to $400 price range.
You will need memory voltage up to 3.5 volts or so to reach these performance levels with VX or BH5, but the memory itself is cheap "sow's ear" pricing. Some overclockers get their greatest thrills out of pushing cheap parts to unheard of performance levels. That is why the Intel P4 2.4GHz Northwood became legend. These two memories fit that category. You will need an OCZ DDR Booster to supply the voltages on some motherboards, a voltage mod on others, or a new DFI nForce4 if you want up to 4.0V out of the box. But if you supply the voltage, these two memories will provide legendary performance.
The winner depends on your needs. Frankly, the Value VX deserves a Gold Award from someone simply for the incredible performance at chicken feed prices. The BH5 revival is similarly worthy. The OCZ Premier reaches DDR480 at CAS 2.5 and costs just $121, and the pair of $100 CAS 2.5's are a stellar value. There are quite a few winners in this roundup - the winner for you depends on how you plan to use your Value RAM. We hope that we provided enough information on each of these memories to make your choice for best Value RAM an easier decision.
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Wesley Fink - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
xsilver -PLEASE read my Final Words. I made a very clear distinction between Value RAM for normal motherboards and Value RAM for Mad Overcockers. If I take your approach then it assumes there are no overclockers who buy a cheap motherboard, or a DFI nF4 Ultra for $134, and use cheap ram they push to the limit. I assure you there are lots of overclockers who push cheap ram to the limits, and who are looking for some great overclocking RAM at a cheap price. YOUR definition of Value is just one of many and we talk about this in depth on page 2.
Most really cheap motherboards in the Value category have no adjustments at all for memory voltage, so I should logically only test at 2.5V or 2.6V using your approach. We are testing what this Value RAM can do with a consistent test bed.
As for the 6800 Ultra and DFI, they were ONLY used so we could compare results to many of the high-end RAM we have recently tested - to keep the test bed consistent. I can imagine the uproar if I had tested with a 6200 and then listed past results with our 6800 Ultra test bed. We are not suggesting a Value System USE a 6800 Ultra, it is merely to have a consistent test bed.
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
#40 - You are correct about overhead with Super Pi, but since we use a consistent test platform to test memory the Super Pi results can be accurately compared with each other.Your approach to running Super Pi in a RAMdisk is interesting, and should remove some barriers to broader comparison of CPUs and platforms.
xsilver - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
cygniI've been reading anandtech since 1999
and from that time there have been very few instances where CLEAR errors have been made.... I am afraid though this is one of them. I was trying to make a point that it is dissapointing as it is the first review right after anand did his whole spiel about integrity of reviews
about corsair not co-operating... how about source the memory from somewhere else? newegg or other stores would be happy to oblige (they are a major sponsor... and you only need to borrow the ram)
its just sad when corsair smells that you're doing a roundup and they know they could possibly look bad, so therefore they decide not to submit anything for review
I mean imagine if there was a whole nvidia and ati shootout and one team know beforehand that they would lose... and they refuse to submit a card.... would people hear about if the card performs bad? or how companies are trying to do a shifty? people would be all over the forums spewing froth from their mouths!!!
I consider anandtech the best tech website out there and in efforts to making it better I offer constructive criticisms... I don't know where the "All these "anand must be embarrased" posts every time are getting FREAKING OLD""
is coming from but its the first that i've heard of it......
and I don't know how to make it any clearer but this was a VALUE roundup right? who in their right mind would spend craploads of money on a dfi nforce4 + 6800ultra and get VALUE ram? .... I'm not saying you can't use good hardware.... just dont push it to 3.4 damn volts!!!!!
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
#36 - On the AMD Athlon 64, there is no FSB since everything is derived from the HT bus. You are therfore correct that lowering the ram multiplier and running at DDR400 at a higher CPU speed makes little difference on the A64 platform. There are, however, two concerns with this approach:1) There is an Asynchronous Latency penalty, which can be tweaked somewhat on boards with better BIOS options like the DFI. It is not, hoever, the kind of asynchronous penalty you see on a FSB board like Intel.
2) RAM multipliers are usually limited. If you have a standard set of 400, 320, and 266 speeds, you could only achieve DDR400 speed at a CPU frequency of 250. Anything lower than that would be running the RAM at less than 400. Most A64 CPUs can't do 250 on air at stock multipliers (the low end ones can) so they will be running less than optimum ram speed. That's where you could lower CPU multipliers or use a board like the DFI with lots of intermediate RAM ratios.
In the end, overclocking on the AMD is a balancing act with more variables than the simpler FSB platforms. You are balancing LDT (the HyperTransport Multiplier which controls HT speed), CPU frequency, and RAM frequency to find the best mix for performance. You also have all the different memory controllers since they are on the CPU.
In my experience there are not any simple rules for this, except faster values usually perform better than slower on the same variable. In other words, the easiest way to consistently improve memory performance is 1:1 memory speed.
AnnihilatorX - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Replying #29 Wesley FinkThat's exactly a Gold series but NOT value series.
Based on part number OCZ4001024WV3DC-K
http://www.atacom.com/program/print_html_new.cgi?&...
is the right one.
See the reply below
Replying #21 dvinnen
I asked some other people on other forums. I've post some info on anandtech forum
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid...
highlandsun - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Just a tiny point, I see this misperception all over - Super Pi is not a pure number crunching program. It writes huge sets of temporary files to disk and reads them back between loop iterations. A lot of people quote Super Pi times and assume they're all reasonably comparable measures of CPU+memory performance, but they're overlooking the fact that there's a significant chunk of I/O in there too, so disk type and filesystem state (fragmentation, etc.) will also impact the timing results.If you can install a ~128MB RAMdisk and run from there, then you can be sure that you're only measuring CPU+memory with Super Pi. (Then of course, the performance will depend on how good the RAMdisk's block memory move implementation is. But if you use the same version for all tests, you'll get consistent, comparable results.)
ChineseDemocracyGNR - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
It's been mentioned "if you don't overclock..."You don't need expensive RAM to overclock the Athlon 64. On this platform the memory is always running on a divider, there's no performance penalty from overclocking the processor by increasing the reference clock but keeping the memory happy at DDR400.
As for the $195 "Value" RAM, I wouldn't recommend it. Save $100 and get a more powerful video card or whatever else your system needs. This money could mean an upgrade from a GeForce 6200 to a 6600GT, or from a 6600GT to a X800XL; there's no RAM that makes up for that.
You can achieve the same overclock on your processor with DDR400 RAM that doesn't like to be overclocked!
I know this article was a lot of work, but I think it would be a good idea to have at least one other test platform. The DFI LP nF4 is known to be... "special" when it comes to memory compatibility. The results could be (and probably would be) very different on another board, like the more value-oriented nForce4 or K8T890 boards that would fit in better with this article. Heck, I think even the DFI NF4-DAGF would be a different story.
Cygni - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
xsilver1) ALL reviews work this way. You think Autoweek BUYS the cars they review? You think PC Gamer BUYS the games they review? Anandtech asked for samples, and was given them. Or they are given to AnandTech to promote the product. That is how hardware reviews / review sites WORK.
2) They were pushing the RAM to the absolute limits, which meant using voltages not available on most baords. Big deal! They also noted performance at each different speed setting, so even if your board doesnt have that voltage, they STILL had you covered.
All these "anand must be embarrased" posts every time are getting FREAKING OLD. If you HONESTLY think that, there is NO WAY you have been here for more than a few months. Let alone years.
Googer
RTFA, and RTFC. For the love of christ...
Googer - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
How can you do an article like this and NOT benchmark the KING of ALL Value RAM- Crucial?cryptonomicon - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
hmm I asked last review and I received I suppose...>> FINALLY << a comparison against BH5.. and by coincidence I'ts amazing that they are producing some, however it is just from those old dies lying around.as a side note, wth happened to kingston and mushkin. their stuff only hit 204mhz??? what a joke.
:spelling corrections:
"OCZ PC3200 Gold is sold as a 1 GB kit with two 412MB DIMMs at a price of about $195. "
-change to 512mb