Computex 2005 - Looking Ahead

Geil's Impressive Display

Geil went all out at Computex to demonstrate what they could do with DDR and DDR-2. In addition to the DDR2-1066 that we have already talked about, there were several DDR demos.

There seemed to be a lot of interest in the Geil demonstration of DDR400 at CAS 1.5.

Click to enlarge.

The new DFI nForce4 boards support CAS 1.5 as a BIOS choice, and possibly a few other high-end boards. CAS 1.5 sounds impressive, but AMD tells us that they do not support CAS 1.5 in their on-chip memory controller. And the memory controller is on the AMD chip after all - and not on the motherboard. Our own tests several weeks ago comparing CAS 1.5 and CAS 2.0 on the DFI board did not find any performance difference in these two CAS timings using an AMD processor. We've asked Geil for samples, but we will reserve judgement until we have actually tested the new CAS 1.5 DIMMs.

Geil was also showing DDR running at a stable DDR700 speed at fast timings.

Click to enlarge.

Again, part of the secret was single-sided DIMMs - and everyone's single-sided DIMMs run faster than the double-sided DIMMs that most everyone actually buys. Geil's performance is impressive, and it demonstrates their excellent binning capabilities, but we suspect that many of the single-sided high-speed dimms from competitors will perform similarly if we tested with 256MB single-bank DIMMs. If you enlarge the image you will also see the FSB is 350 (700), but the CPU/RAM ratios are CPU/4. Our experience at this setting with Athlon 64 is that the true RAM speed sets to about 80% of CPU speed instead of the expected 100%. We would really be more comfortable that the memory is truly running at DDR700 if we could see it verified with other utilities that measure the RAM speed. We plan to take a closer look at these DIMMs in our standard double-sided configuration on our standard DFI DDR test bed.

Geil was also proudly displaying their new carbon-fiber heatspreaders. They claim that the carbon-fiber is lighter, cooler, and more efficient than the more commonly used aluminum and copper heatspreaders. However they work, it is undeniable that the carbon-fiber is a great look - and really makes the high-end Geil memory stand out from the crowd.