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Corsair PC133 CL-2, Mushkin PC133 High Performance Rev.2, Enhanced Memory Systems HSDRAM 150
The Hall of Fame (150 MHz at CAS-2)
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(Review by MS, September 20, 2000)
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Summary
We have rounded up a number of high end DIMMs and tested them for the ablity to run above the arbitrary number of 150 MHz at CAS-2 settings as well as to run at least 160 MHz stable at CAS-3. Test systems were based on the ASUS CUSL2 (Intel i815E) and the MSI K7T Pro (VIA KT 133). The final survivers of this round up were the new Corsair PC133 CL-2, the Mushkin High Performance Rev.2 and the Enhanced Memory Systems HSDRAM 150 DIMMs. At 2:2:2 (CAS delay, RAS-to-CAS delay, Precharge) both the Corsair and the Mushkin DIMMs ran with supreme stability up to 153 MHz. The Enhanced Memory Systems HSDRAM 150, needing a RAS-to-CAS delay of 3 cycles ran at CAS-2 up to 166 MHz. Both the Corsair and the Mushkin DIMM had no problem running 166 MHz either, albeit at CAS-3 setting. In terms of performance all DIMMs were identical at the same timing settings.
Unfortunately, at the moment, technical progress is once again hindered by legal issues. More specifically, everyone who has been waiting for DDR as the new and improved memory interface will most likely have to wait a little bit longer, for the obvious reason that, regardless of how strong everyone in the DRAM industry feels about the claims made by either Rambus or the rest of the world, the issue is still not resolved. That, in turn, causes a certain cautiousness since nobody wants to invest in technologies that could theoretically be wiped out by a simple stroke of a pen or to face exorbitant royalties, possibly charged retroactively.
In real life, the situation is not quite as pessimistic but we still won’t see DDR hitting the market as promised, that is, early to mid September. In turn, that means that the Christmas season is lost and, consequently, in the last three to four weeks, the concerted efforts of pushing DDR to market appear to have suffered from a severe decrease of enthusiasm. Optimistically, we won’t expect DDR enabled mainboards until late October, a more pessimistic view does not see them until December this year.
CPU speed, on the other hand is steadily increasing and, in order to keep up with the raw processing power of the PIII or Athlon, a few tricks are needed. A few weeks ago, we posted our performance analysis of Latency vs. Bandwidth. A few days later, we noticed a similar article on Tom’s Hardware, entitled the 150 MHz Project. No pun intended, there is nothing wrong with that, great minds think alike, but what was interesting to read was the claim that there is currently no memory available that is capable of stable operation at 150 MHz and CAS latency of 2. This is of particular importance, since latency is the more crucial factor for overall performance, as we showed in the previous article.
On the other hand, there is a certain truth to the statement on Tom’s hardware, as there are not too many DIMMs currently available that run stable at or beyond 150 MHz and a CAS latency of 2.
We have been snooping around and gathered a few of those and put them on the stand. We did request more but upon hearing our criteria to be included in this round-up which were:
Stable operation at 150 MHz and CAS-2
Stable operation at 160 MHz and CAS-3 (not possible on the VIA KT133 platform, due to chipset limitations).
We couldn’t get all manufacturers contacted to participate, some others sent us their modules but since they didn’t make it, we consider it a matter of professional courtesy not to mention them further in this specific context.
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