OCZ PC2-6400 Titanium EPP-Ready Memory Kit (2GB)

Titanium DIMMs

Beginning with a physical look at OCZ's new memory we see that it is wrapped in their XTC heatspreaders with labeling on one side identifying what the unit is and its specs.  The heatspreaders themselves are a nickel color or I suppose I should say Titanium since the outer covering is a "...unique titanium mirrored..." finish as per the OCZ website.

     

The XTC heatspreaders are based on the principle of balance.  The honey comb mesh you see is the contact area between a more solid outer retention ring and the individual memory modules on the IC.  We all know that to maximize cooling you need the greatest amount of contact area possible to come into play.  In the case of memory, heat gets trapped easily between each specific memory module on the DIMM in the form of warm air.  By trying to balance contact area with a mesh to allow the heated air to escape you get a higher level of performance.  As we've seen again and again, the design works and works well.

Performance

Using SiSoft Sandra 2007 Pro’s Memory Bandwidth Benchmark to gauge the DIMM’s performance in our test bed, testing will begin with the factory timings of 4-4-4-15 1T.  Things will then shift to our pushing the memory as far as it will go under these timings as well as seeing what kind of reach we have after loosening things up to a 5-5-5-15 2T setting.  Most tightly timed memory products have a habit of overclocking well, so I'm curious how high we can go with both the 1T command rate as well as the much looser 2T command rate.

The memory dividers of our Foxconn test bed are automatic, creating a need to drop the CPU multiplier to 10x to keep the memory speeds on target.  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.  During testing, each benchmarked stage was run with Seti@home for 24 hours to ensure that the system was 100% stable at speed.  Any less than that is unacceptable.

Test Bed

• Foxconn C51XEM2AA mainboard

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

• Thermaltake Mini Typhoon Cooler

• HIS X1650XT IceQ Turbo

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

• Generic DVD-RW drive

• OCZ GameXStream 700w PSU

• Thermaltake Mozart Tx Case

• Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

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