Ultra Products PC3200 XL 1gb Memory Kit

Two please

The Ultra XL product is a dual channel memory kit.  Included are two 512mb sticks of their low latency PC3200 memory.  The kit is also offered in a 512mb kit (2 x 256mb DIMMS.)  Gold anodized aluminum heat spreaders adorn the Ultra with a holographic logo/info label on one side.

  

Pulling the heatspreaders off, we were pleasantly surprised to find that thick sections of thermal tape were used to ensure convection from the memory chips to the heat spreader.  Most memory manufacturers use the thin thermal tape that is about as thick as a standard strip of scotch tape.  Ultra has opted to go with the thick stuff that is five or more times as thick, virtually guaranteeing excellent heat transfer.

Looking closer at the memory chips you can see that Ultra choose to go with the same Samsung TCCD units the top tier manufacturers use.  These chips are rated at 4ns CAS3 DDR500 operation.  We have seen these chips take being overclocked up to 250MHz (500MHz DDR) and above frequently in the past so at this point I'm expecting big things here.

Testing

To give us some rough idea of performance, we are going to us SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark program to give us some numbers to compare with the Corsair and Mushkin low latency module equivalents.  While I think the chart of settings for selected speeds that Ultra has done is nice, I tend to look at low latency memory with three things in mind.  First does it run the advertised 2-2-2-5 at DDR400?  Second, how high can I get it up to while retaining my 2-2-2-5 settings?  Lastly, taking out all the stops and loosening the timings up to 3-4-4-8, how high can this stuff go?

We verified stability by running all tested settings under load for 12 hours glitch free to ensure our results were stable.  The scores below are the result of five runs per benchmark on each product with the highest and lowest scores thrown out.  The remaining three were then averaged which is what you see here.  The speeds you will see are the actual bus.  The written DDR (DOUBLE data rate) speeds will be x2 this. 

Intel Test Bed

• Intel 2.4GHz Pentium 4 ‘C’ chip

• Asetek L20 Waterchill H2O Cooling Kit

• ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mainboard

• Chaintech GeForce AA6800

• Generic DVD+/-RW

• Seagate 120gb SATA HDD

• Windows XP Pro with all patches and SP2 installed

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