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Summary

DDR2 is becoming more and more a factor in the memory industry. Despite the fact that it is currently limited to the Intel Pentium4 platform, the market share has increased not only in the OEM market but we also see some higher acceptance in the enthusiast community. We have taken a number of samples from manufacturers such as Corsair, GeIL, Mushkin, Kingston and PDP and ran it through the different paces with synthetic benchmarks and real world applications.

Editorial Preface: This article expresses the sole view of the author and has been edited only for language and terminologic accuracy

Memory technologies are in an almost constant state of flux. What seems like cutting edge advancement in the form of released products, has actually been in various stages of R&D for years. When DDR2 was released this past year to somewhat of a mixed reception, Intel, DDR2 memory manufacturers, and Intel’s motherboard partners were left slack jawed at both the lukewarm sales and the growing inventory given the expense and preparation put into DDR2 technologies. Several factors conspired to keep DDR2 from moving as fast as anticipated. Of those, a poor economical environment, the relative comparative performance offered between present systems at launch between established DDR and the newer DDR2 systems, and to a point the competition offered by the Athlon64 processor held people to consider the leap to DDR2 questionable.

Because of potential conflicts of interest, OCZ DDR2 modules are excluded from this review

Almost a year has passed since the release of the 925x chipset and DDR2 PC memory was launched. What have we learned in that year, and what may now make DDR2 a more viable option? This could easily devolve into a forum thread from hell in many cases, but to be brief, I will say that the introduction of the 925XE or nVidia's SLI chipset, as well as the decreases in pricing of DDR2, have made the LGA775 option more justifiable as an upgrade path for many users. I’m not saying all users should run, jump, or speed ahead on this path towards computer nirvana. However, if you are in the market for a socket T/LGA775 setup, the time may be now to consider DDR2 as your future upgrade choice.

Today we are concentrating our focus on several sets of DDR2 memory that promise to hold your interest over the next few pages. We have a little bit of everything with regards to memory speed, latencies, price, and quite a few brands many of us have grown to love. Absent is OCZ, for obvious reasons since any favorable results could be construed as skewed. I however will miss them in this roundup as their modules have performed very well for me in the past. That said, let’s consider out test platform and discuss some limitations of the data collected.

next page:    => The Test Setup (and it's limitations) =>