The Return of 2-2-2: Corsair 3200XL & Samsung PC4000
by Wesley Fink on June 15, 2004 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Memory
Intel Test Results: Corsair 3200XL PRO
To be considered stable for test purposes, Quake3 benchmark, UT2003 Demo, Super PI, Aquamark 3, and Comanche 4 had to complete without incident. Any of these, and in particular Super PI, will crash a less-than stable memory configuration.Corsair 3200XL PRO (DDR400) - 2 x 512Mb Double-Bank | |||||
Speed | Memory Timings & Voltage | Quake3 fps | Sandra UNBuffered | Sandra Standard Buffered | Super PI 2M places (time in sec) |
400DDR 800FSB |
2-2-2-5 2.5V |
326.4 | INT 2900 FLT 2942 |
INT 4525 FLT 4532 |
128 |
433DDR 866FSB |
2-2-2-5 2.75V |
353.0 | INT 3069 FLT 3148 |
INT 4852 FLT 4875 |
119 |
466DDR 933FSB |
2-3-3-6 2.75V |
369.1 | INT 3237 FLT 3219 |
INT 5181 FLT 5196 |
113 |
500DDR 1000FSB |
2.5-3-3-7 2.75V |
394.1 | INT 3346 FLT 3379 |
INT 5568 FLT 5575 |
106 |
506DDR 1048FSB |
3-4-4-7 2.85V |
- | - | - | - |
The most astounding result in our tests was the ability of Corsair 3200XL to run at 2-2-2-5 timings all the way to DDR450. This is the highest FSB that we have ever achieved with 2-2-2 timings. Corsair's claims of an extremely wide range of overclocking is certainly justified, with 3200XL providing excellent performance from DDR400 to DDR500. DDR500 is the practical limit with this memory as there is virtually no head room above DDR500. 3200XL topped out at DDR506 at much slower timings than required at DDR500. As a result, there was no point to running DDR506 benchmarks as they would have been lower than DDR500 results.
11 Comments
View All Comments
Pumpkinierre - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link
Good article again, Wesley. Pity its not DDR500 at 2-2-2. I'm still holding off upgrading. I wouldnt trust that VIA chipset with the Corsair RAM. Plenty of people run their memory outside SPD specs withot problems. And don't give up on the i875 yet. There's a lot of issues with DDR2 and 915/925. I notice that ABIT have brought out a Sckt775 865 mobo. Hmm I wonder why?Also the P4/i875 seems to equal or better the S939 a64 in unbuffered sandra which I wouldnt have expected because of the on die a64 mem. controller etc.. Then in the buffered test the a64 clearly gets the upper hand which again is a suprise as many of the buffers are associated with MMX/SSE/SSE2 where the a64s are supposed to be weaker. I only trust the unbufferd tests but this may explain the fact that the FX chips beat the P4s on memory bandwidth but were behind on the bandwidth intensive encoding tests.
In the one test (Samsung mem.) where you test the a64 at different bus speeds (200&240MHz), the gaming results were equal or worse in the game tests despite an ~85 increase in mem. bandwidth ! Unfortunately you had different memory timings but it reinforces the importance of latency reduction rather than bandwidth for gaming performance.