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Conclusion

Corsair’s new 256 DIMMs offer a variety of distinct advantages. The most obvious is that in systems with fewer memory slots, a higher amount of system memory can be run. Since 256 Mbytes are achieved using only 16 chips, the overall capacitance is only about half of a similar configuration using x 4 bit parts which would need to employ two DIMMs with 16 chips each. This point is very important for the overclocking community since increased capacitance of the system RAM often exceeds the power of the memory clock and as a consequence the rising and falling edges of the clock signal become more sluggish. This translates into a delay in reaching the threshold at which data output can start and results in a shortened data output window. On other words, the steeper the clock, the less setup time is wasted and the DIMMs will be able to function at a higher frequency.

In view of the current trend of Athlon systems getting more and more recognition, here is another distinct advantage. Because of the clock forwarding of the Athlon system logic, the memory controller does not cope well with the additional penalty cycle caused by registered DIMMs, thus, leaving not too many options to actually populate current Athlon boards with more than 384 MB of system RAM. The strenght of the Athlon, however, is exactly its enormous power that can be put to good use in video editing, image compression and therelike. All of these, however, involve movement of huge amounts of data and therefore, very often the use of a temporary swap file. There is nothing that kills performance as does shuffling data back and forth to the virtual memory which is overt from the massive performance increase in the playback suites. In real life, the situation is even more drastic. In a system running 384 MB RAM, keeping about 150MB worth of Photoshop open and editing them runs about 10 times as fast as in a system sporting only 128 MB system RAM. In other words, forget about additional CPU power if the bottleneck is somewhere else.

We wish to thank Dean Kent (RealWorldTechnology), Don Lieberman (Corsair) and Dave Bondurant (EMS) for helpful discussions of the Ins and Outs of memory technology.

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