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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Griotspeak - Sunday, March 12, 2006 - link
2GB PC-5300 modules should be available?i KNOW there isnt much hope of a definite answer, but i'd like to have some idea since i could wait a month or so.
Regs - Saturday, February 25, 2006 - link
Maybe i'll wait until it has a use.pnyffeler - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
I'm feeling a little uncertain about why anyone would want to rush out and purchase a new AM2 system ASAP. What advantage would you gain over a 939 rig? Right now, DDR2 memory is loads more expensive than DDR, and according to Tom's Hardware's analysis, there isn't any advantage. Well, at least, not theoretically until DDR2-800 becomes available, but even so, are we going to see a significant increase in performance? It seems that the smart move is to set up a 939 system, dump it full of good, cheap DDR RAM, and save your pennies for the new DirectX 10 graphics card that will be available at the end of the year when Vista comes out. I just see DDR2 as the next logical transition, especially with chip makers changing over time to DDR2, but you won't see me jumping on the bandwagon any time soon....IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=270...">http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=270...WTF is up with this review in terms of spelling errors and inconsistencies??
The tightest timings are NOT the PC2-5300 kit according to the table, but RATHER THE OCZ DDR2 PC2-4200.
The only one I see that achieves 3-2-2-8 at FSB of 345 is OCZ DDR2 PC2-4200, not the Crucial PC2-5300 kit.
Plus, CONSISTENT spelling errors that say MB/s. I sure don't want my memory bandwidth to be single digit MB/s even on a 486 PC.
leexgx - Saturday, February 25, 2006 - link
what spelling errors (ram does not work at 9000GB/s) that result is right
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, February 28, 2006 - link
I was likely referring to the fact that the table and the paragraph below is inconsistent. There are no such numbers on the table.
hwhacker - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
He explains this in the article. Overclocking the FSB on intel's chips is different than on AMD chips. You can much finer tune an AMD because of the adjustable multiplier...unless you have mega-cooling to allow the processor to scale with the memory speed...It's kind of tough.RTFA. ;)
Marlowe - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
They could reach 400 MHz mem easily with the 4:5 divider. (would require 320 MHz FSB)Marlowe - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
Last time I checked DDR800 is 400 MHz real frequency. I've looked through the heap of hard to manage screenshots, (yes what happened to graphs?) but the highest I saw was 350 MHz. Did I miss something? Were you not able to reach 400 MHz?ATWindsor - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
Why do I suddenly hae to enable referer logging to see the pictures in the article?