Overclocker Cafe - OCZ EL DDR PC4000 Gold Edition 2GB Kit

OCZ EL PC4000 Gold Edition Memory Kit (2GB)

Performance

What we are going to focus our testing with the OCZ EL PC4000 Gold Edition Memory 2GB Kit are the benefits from an objective and subjective standpoint, of one versus two gigs of system memory. We will be using three benchmarks to give Joe User an idea of what they should expect at home. Our three benches are SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark, Super-Pi and Battlefield 2. Our comparison memory will be some Corsair DDR550, set with the exact same memory timings and run at the same speed as the larger OCZ memory.

Test Bed

Intel P4 2.4 GHz Northwood @ 3.0GHz (1.75v)

ASUS P4C800E Deluxe mainboard

HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II (AGP) VGA Card

Maxtor DiamondMax 80gb SATA HDD

Generic DVD-RW drive

Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

Results

The first of our tests will be with Super-Pi. Super-Pi is a program that as I'm sure you guessed, calculates Pi. It does so to a certain number of places and records the time in the number of seconds it takes to do this. Today, we are calculating Pi to 2M places.

For all intensive purposes, a difference of less than 2% is not statistically significant. I actually expected to see the increased memory size really pay off here but as you can see, I was mistaken.

Our next benchmark is more of a subjective measure and the big one that most of you reading this review will be the most interested in; Battlefield 2. Loading up the Zatar Wetlands map we used FRAPS to record frame rates over a four period and that is what you see below. We have a particular route we play this map in within single player to get the runs as close (but not exact) as possible. Let's take a look.

You can see that the one gig equipped run takes a hit more often in performance than do the two gigs. On the graph, you can't discern much here in this context, HOWEVER, during gameplay, the occasional shutter that many of us have experienced was COMPLETELY gone with two gigs installed. Aside from this, the game load speed and speed in unloading game recourses was dramatically cut down. So much so that this alone has made me a full believer that anything less than two gigs is a waste of time for some of these new memory hungry titles like BF2.

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