Corsair XMS3500 DDR 433 memory

Manufacturer: Corsair Micro
Supplied by: Corsair Micro
Street Price: $120 

by Dean Barker  (1/10/2003)

Introduction

Memory speeds have gotten ridiculously fast over the past six months.  No other area of high performance computers has made the gains that DDR RAM has made in recent months.  Our last go round in faster than a speeding bullet land was with some Corsair XMS 3200 and XtremeDDR PC3200 DIMMs.  The slowest of these sticks at looser memory settings was banging out 191 MHz FSB (DDR x2 = 382 MHz) while the fastest crossed the line at 207 MHz FSB (DDR x2 = 414 MHz.  Please renew the prescription on my inhaler.  Today, courtesy of Corsair Micro we have two 256mb sticks of their new XMS3500 Platinum Series DDR RAM.  We wish to thank the good people at Corsair Micro for making this review possible.

The Unit

The Corsair XMS3500 sticks came complete with aluminum heatspreaders.  As we have noted previously, we have yet to detect heat of any consequence coming off a stick of memory.  Functional, from a performance standpoint or not, the heatspreader does add some coolness points from an aesthetic point of view.  The usual black heat spreader normally associated with Corsair DIMMs was absent on the XMS3500 Platinum series we had.  (When ordering you do have a choice between the two colors.)  Our test units have a bright aluminum heat spreader with blue Corsair labeling.

  

Specifications

• 5ns Winbond chips

• Designed for memory bus speed of 2 x 217 MHz

• CAS latency: 2 cycles

• RAS precharge: 3 cycles

• RAS to CAS delay: 3 cycles

• RAS active to precharge: 7 cycles

• Command rate: 1T (1 cycle)

• Available in 256mb and 512mb DIMMs

• Lifetime warranty

A quick aside: The XMS3500 DIMMs are offered in 256mb and 512 mb flavors.  Corsair claims that a single 512 stick is a hair faster than two 256mb sticks of like memory.  Maybe next go round we can test that but for today we are going to thrash this pair.  So.. no sense being overly wordy.  Let's get down to business.

 

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