Crucial Ballistix DDR2: The New DDR2 Standard?
by Steve Carmel & Wesley Fink on February 21, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Memory
Final Words
Crucial Technology and Micron have introduced some new and very competitive low-latency DDR2 memory chips and DIMMs. They are certainly competitive with the best DDR2 in the current market and deserve to be on your shopping list for DDR2 memory.
We have heard that the new Crucial DIMMs fare better on the upcoming AM2 platform, but until AM2 launches and we can test for ourselves, this is just speculation. AMD's new AM2 Athlon 64 memory controller will finally allow the use of DDR2 memory on the A64 platform, and the hope is the integrated DDR2 memory controller will finally allow DDR2 to run at the low latencies that will make DDR2 a compelling choice compared to DDR memory. In due time, we will have answers to these questions.
With AMD entering into the DDR2 fray, this will finally provide some apt competition to Intel DDR2 solutions, which have been on the market well over a year already. Will AMD's new AM2 engineering provide enough impetus to spur the DDR2 market further? Will there be enough DRAM manufacturing capacity to support future demands? The memory market is already behaving as if this will be the case. Most memory makers are no longer putting development work in new DDR products with most of the current R&D directed towards DDR2 improvements.
After torture-testing both the Crucial PC2-5300 DDR2 and the PC2-6400 DDR2 2GB memory kits, this reviewer was quite pleased. Not only did the memory run below specified voltages (2.2v), but stress testing such as dual instances of Prime95, SuperPi, or Memtest86 barely budged these modules. Both of these Ballistix parts are using the same IC's, albeit with slightly different Serial Presence Detect (SPD) programming. The retail pricing is $389.99 for the DDR2-800 2GB kit, and $360.99 for the DDR2-667 kit from Crucial Technology. The price for these 2GB DDR2 memory kits are not cheap, but the quality is high with performance as good as you will find in DDR2 availability today.
Those able to scale their processors high enough to ramp to sufficient front side bus speeds will see some very beneficial bandwidth and efficiency numbers produced by this pair of quality DDR2 modules. Enthusiasts using water cooling or phase changed solutions will be most apt to reap the benefits from this new Crucial memory.
More information about the new Micron memory chips will be available shortly. Other competing manufacturers such as Corsair and OCZ Technology will be able to source the same IC's and be competitive in the DDR2 marketplace. Look for this to occur by early March. We extend our personal thanks to Crucial, and Sam Harmer, in particular, for providing AnandTech with these new DDR2 modules as soon as they hit the market. Crucial/Micron, as always, was very helpful in providing information for this review.
Crucial Technology and Micron have introduced some new and very competitive low-latency DDR2 memory chips and DIMMs. They are certainly competitive with the best DDR2 in the current market and deserve to be on your shopping list for DDR2 memory.
We have heard that the new Crucial DIMMs fare better on the upcoming AM2 platform, but until AM2 launches and we can test for ourselves, this is just speculation. AMD's new AM2 Athlon 64 memory controller will finally allow the use of DDR2 memory on the A64 platform, and the hope is the integrated DDR2 memory controller will finally allow DDR2 to run at the low latencies that will make DDR2 a compelling choice compared to DDR memory. In due time, we will have answers to these questions.
With AMD entering into the DDR2 fray, this will finally provide some apt competition to Intel DDR2 solutions, which have been on the market well over a year already. Will AMD's new AM2 engineering provide enough impetus to spur the DDR2 market further? Will there be enough DRAM manufacturing capacity to support future demands? The memory market is already behaving as if this will be the case. Most memory makers are no longer putting development work in new DDR products with most of the current R&D directed towards DDR2 improvements.
After torture-testing both the Crucial PC2-5300 DDR2 and the PC2-6400 DDR2 2GB memory kits, this reviewer was quite pleased. Not only did the memory run below specified voltages (2.2v), but stress testing such as dual instances of Prime95, SuperPi, or Memtest86 barely budged these modules. Both of these Ballistix parts are using the same IC's, albeit with slightly different Serial Presence Detect (SPD) programming. The retail pricing is $389.99 for the DDR2-800 2GB kit, and $360.99 for the DDR2-667 kit from Crucial Technology. The price for these 2GB DDR2 memory kits are not cheap, but the quality is high with performance as good as you will find in DDR2 availability today.
Those able to scale their processors high enough to ramp to sufficient front side bus speeds will see some very beneficial bandwidth and efficiency numbers produced by this pair of quality DDR2 modules. Enthusiasts using water cooling or phase changed solutions will be most apt to reap the benefits from this new Crucial memory.
More information about the new Micron memory chips will be available shortly. Other competing manufacturers such as Corsair and OCZ Technology will be able to source the same IC's and be competitive in the DDR2 marketplace. Look for this to occur by early March. We extend our personal thanks to Crucial, and Sam Harmer, in particular, for providing AnandTech with these new DDR2 modules as soon as they hit the market. Crucial/Micron, as always, was very helpful in providing information for this review.
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leexgx - Saturday, February 25, 2006 - link
you Must understand the CPU that tomshardware got was an Test CPU, thay realy should of not done an benchmark as the CPU it self was not fully working and the DDR2 ram that was used was could only work at DDR2 666 and the timeings was stuck at 4-4-4-12 and may have been limted by the broken DDR2 contorler in it as well (you realy should look at it and not trust the resluts at all and thay have told you that its not to be trusted as well as its not an retail product as toms' stats)basicly at the time when P4 came to use DDR2 the timeing speed of DDR2 was silly DDR1 would out perform DDR2 this is why amd have not gone to DDR2 as ram speeds are now to the point where it will not be an bottle neck (and Ram price between DDR1 and 2 are not that must £10-£40 $40-$80 depending on size)
testing the Ram performance in am P4/P5 system is not usefull any way as it can not use it (get some intresting resluts when AM2 fully comes ot)
(the date is 06/06/06 when it comes out)
my self i am going to stick my AMD X2 3800+ 939 and mobo and 2Gb of ram in me server (board is dieing caps are leaking on this P4 mobo) and get AM2 when 65mm fabs come out for AM2 and fast ram by then (and some good mobos)
all that will probly be end of year i can wait my 3800+ X2 is running at 2.4ghz (basicly 4600+X2 as the ram is running at DDr480 as well)and its happy and cool keeps me happy
Jedi2155 - Sunday, February 26, 2006 - link
DDR1 outperforming DDR2 wasn't the main reason AMD didn't go to DDR2 right away. The main reason (if you read AMD's lawsuit against Intel's marketing practices) was because Intel created separate consortium to design DDR2 with the memory manufacturer's with the full intent of keeping AMD out of the loop. Thus AMD was a year or 2 behind Intel in developing the memory controller for DDR2 (as they couldn't see the specs till it was finished) nor did they have any input in the design of the specification.And thus DDR2 sucks more than it should had AMD been involved :)
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
The AM2 platform launches on June 6, 2006 (6/6/6). Those aren't memory timings.Spacecomber - Tuesday, February 21, 2006 - link
I'll admit that I mostly skimmed through this article, but since much of the data seemed to be in the form of screenshots that are too small to be easily legible without cliking on them to get the enlarged version, I found it hard to get a quick glimpse of what this article might have to offer.I would much prefer results to be presented in traditional graphs and tables, instead.
Olaf van der Spek - Tuesday, February 21, 2006 - link
What is the information about the AMD CPU doing in this test?Too much copy/paste?
JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
Yeah, that does seem out of place.Authors also need to go back and recheck their MB\GB , MHz\GHz labels. I sure don't want any 4.5MB\sec RAM.
96redformula - Tuesday, February 21, 2006 - link
My faith in crucial is gone.