ECS L7VTA (KT400): 1st with 333MHz FSB Support

Stress Testing the ECS L7VTA & Performance

Recently, we have found that a lot of so-called "DDR333" motherboards have had trouble running DDR333 at aggressive timings with all memory banks occupied. Only when we back down the memory timings do we see better reliability and stability. Therefore, we think it's necessary to show our readers from this point on how well these "DDR333" motherboards run with the most aggressive timings possible with all memory banks filled with DDR333 memory. The following is a chart of the DRAM timings we were able to run the ECS L7VTA at with 3 DIMMs of Corsair CL2 DDR333 memory:

ECS L7VTA Memory Performance (all banks filled)
Clock Speed: 166MHz
Timing Mode: Turbo
CAS Latency: 2
Bank Interleave: Disabled
Precharge to Active: 2T
Active to Precharge: 5T
Active to CMD: 2T
Command Rate: 1T

Save bank interleave, these are some pretty aggressive memory settings. The ECS L7VTA was able to run Prime95 for 48 hours straight before we headed onto other means of stress testing. We ran SPECviewperf 7.0 (which is part of our benchmark suite) 3 times over as well as UT2003 and Quake 3 Arena before we finally concluded that the ECS L7VTA was stable at these settings. Of course, it would takes weeks or even months more of around-the-clock testing before we would be able to conclude exactly how reliable the ECS L7VTA really is, but these tests should give a good indication of how the ECS L7VTA will perform under such intense situations.

We were also able to run DDR400 fairly reliably. However, our memory settings weren't quite as aggressive as the DDR333 memory settings were, and performance was always a bit lower with DDR400 than with DDR333, which was disappointing to say the least. It came as no surprise to us when we were unable to boot into Windows running 3 sticks of Corsair CL2 DDR400 on the ECS L7VTA, even at the most conservative memory settings possible. We were able to boot into Windows with 2 sticks of DDR400, but we encountered stability issues, like Prime95 failures and random reboots. Therefore, we were only able to run one stick of DDR400 for our benchmarks and stress tests. Here are the timings we used:

ECS L7VTA Memory Performance (one bank filled)
Clock Speed: 200MHz
Timing Mode: Auto (SPD)
CAS Latency: 2
Bank Interleave: Disabled
Precharge to Active: 3T
Active to Precharge: 5T
Active to CMD: 3T
Command Rate: 1T

These settings actually aren't too bad at all, even for DDR333 memory. However, we must take into consideration that these timings were run with only 1 stick of DDR400 installed, whereas we were able to run 3 sticks of DDR333 before, and at more aggressive values too.