OCZ PC2-6400 Special Ops Edition - Urban Elite Memory Kit (2GB)

Performance

The main attraction of the OCZ Special Ops Edition Urban Elite memory is its timings, so that’s a good place for us to start.  We will be using SiSoft Sandra 2007 Pro’s Memory Bandwidth Benchmark to gauge the DIMM’s performance in our test bed.  Testing will then shift to our pushing the memory as far as it will go under the 4-4-3-15 timings as well as the 5-5-5-15 setting.  Most tight timing memory products have a tendency to overclock like an SOB with the timings opened up.  I have high hopes for these sticks.

The memory dividers of our Foxconn test bed are automatic, causing the need for us to drop the CPU multiplier to 10x to keep the memory speeds clean and true.  When running our Athlon 64 3500 CPU at spec, (200MHz with an 11x multiplier) our memory speed unfortunately kicks down to 734MHz with the automatic divider.  By adjusting the multiplier to 10x we can run true DDR2 800 speed.  Each level benchmarked was also run with Seti@home for 24 hours to ensure that the system was 100% stable.

Test Bed

• Foxconn C51XEM2AA mainboard

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket AM2 (clocked at 200x10 instead of its spec 200x11)

• ThermalRight Ultra 90 Cooler

• Albatron GeForce 7800GTX

• (2) 250MB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA II HDD in RAID 0

• Generic DVD-RW drive

• OCZ GameXStream 700w

• Thermaltake Mozart Tx Case

• Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

Results

First things first, we start with spec speeds of DDR2-800 at the 4-4-3-15 timings on the CAS, TRCD, TRP and TRAS settings respectively.  Below is a screen shot of SiSoft Sandra 2007 Pro's benchmark results showing results about as we expected.  The second shot is of the impressive max overclock the OCZ DIMMs graced us with at these same 4-4-3-15 settings.  For our overclocking results, we retained our 10x CPU multiplier setting but kicked the HT multiplier from 5x to 4x to give us as much a chance as possible at some high speed overclocks.  Can you say DDR2 914?  Check out the performance gains as shown by Sandra 2007.

  

914MHz is impressive but that just makes me curious.  If we can hit 914MHz with tight timings, what kind of reach will we have with a much looser 5-5-5-15 that most other DDR2 800 comes rated at?  Let's find out.

Talk about Mr. Toad’s wild ride!  Loosening up the timings not only gave us more headroom but all but took out the ceiling.  DDR2-800 DIMMs capable of running at DDR2-1066, is there anything else that needs to be said?  Be sure to look at the maximum memory bus bandwidth here; 17056 MB/s as opposed to 12768 MB/s at the memory's stock speeds and setting.  That's quite a gain!

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