OCZ EL PC4000 Platinum XTC Memory Kit (2GB)

The XTC heatspreader is fairly straight forward in its operational logic.  By having the main heat plate be a honeycombed type grilling you loose contact area while you gain an increase in air exchange.  Air exchange in this context is called convection - the transfer of thermal energy into the air.  With the air more free flowing around the hot spots, in theory the convection rate is increased.  The balancing act comes from wanting to have as much contact area with the actual hot spot as possible to 'conduct' heat away.  Having just the right mix of convection and conduction is the key to good cooling and it appears OCZ has found a happy medium with the XTC heatspreader.  You can see the contact area of the honeycomb heat plate in the third pic below.  We'll get an idea of how well the XTC handles its job with this DDR500 memory when we come to putting the screws to it and jack up the frequency.  That's in a bit though.

     

Here we have a quick shot of the Micron 5ns memory modules OCZ selected for its EL PC4000 Platinum XTC memory.  While pictures are nice, the proof is in the pudding.

Performance

To gauge the OCZ EL PC4000 XTC memory's performance we will be using SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark as well as Super Pi.  Sandra will be measuring the maximum memory bus bandwidth in MB/s as well as the memory integer and float buffered score as calculated by SiSoft 2005.  Super-Pi is next up with its measuring how long it takes to calculate Pi to the two millionth digit.  While not an altogether practical benchmark, it does give us some real world computative application to look at performance with. 

The most applicable two gig memory kit in the shop to use as a comparison product is some OCZ Gold PC4000 we reviewed not too long ago.  While we like to mix and match manufacturers here, the bold truth of the matter was that we didn't have any Corsair or Mushkin RAM of this type in the house that cold hang.  With regard to our comparison unit, the main difference between it and our review unit is that the comparison memory has its timings set at 3-4-4-8.  This will be a good chance to get some idea of what tighter timings on the memory mean when all the talk is done.  All tests were run five times per bench per product, with the highest and lowest scores of each thrown out and the remaining three averaged and graphed as follows. 

Test Bed

• Intel P4 2.4 GHz Northwood

• ASUS P4C800E Deluxe (i875P) mainboard

• HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II (AGP) VGA Card

• Maxtor DiamondMax 80gb SATA HDD

• Generic DVD-RW drive

• Windows XP Pro SP2

Results

First up is SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth benchmark that measures the Floating FPU and Integer ALU in megabytes of transfer per second.  As you can see, shifting from 3-4-4-8 to the 3-3-3-8 didn't do much as far as Sandra's transfer bench was concerned.

As we said earlier, Super Pi calculates the value of Pi to a predetermined point.  For our benchmarking here, that point is the number of seconds it takes to calculate Pi to the two millionth digit.  The tighter timings of the OCZ EL PC4000 (DDR500) Platinum XTC memory did seem to pay off a bit here.

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