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Conclusions

Once again, after going through the agonies of about 4 days only for testing the different modules, I am ready to swear that this is my last memory review. There is hardly anything as mind-numbing as testing memory, at least if it is done correctly. But then, there are the surprises and quite honestly, it wasn't for anything but grins that I pulled out the ancient Level2 sticks. After that, I would have tested some VCM, too but those didn't fit...

There are a number of conclusions and delusions that need to be derived here. For once, it is always a compromise, either on the component or on the PCB level, choices have to be made. From years of working on DIMMs and things as simple as configuring the resistor network on the PCB, I know that one can either get frequency at the expense of latencies or do it the other way around, that is low latencies with a hit in overall frequency.

For the average user, the low latency solution is the way to go but there are the speed-obsessed overclockers for whom nothing matters but frequency and a few numbers to show and brag ... not that there is anything wrong about that, been there myself, done that, too. Furthermore, I am not going to humiliate myself to rate the different modules here, the numbers shown speak for themselves but there are a few things that need to be said anyway.

All modules tested met their advertised performance levels, whoever wants more has to be aware that this is uncharted territory and that there are no guarantees. The glitches in the SPD programming of all Corsair modules are excusable, after all, not even the P4C800 reads the SPD correctly, which is even more relevant since ASUS has been one of the handful of mainboard manufacturers who actually mastered this task to begin with. Also, the relatively low performance of the XMS3202 can theoretically be explained with the fact that Corsair is using -6 components rather than the higher grade -5 components. But then, the XMS3200 using the same components performed a lot better.

Along those lines, there is no doubt whatsoever that DDR400 is not only here to stay but that it is really just another stepping stone in the lineage of DDR-I. TwinMOS already announced DDR466, others will follow and I am not talking here about the flash and dance community calling themselves manufacturers either. Bottom line is that each and every module put through the paces here would probably have passed with flying colors anywhere else on a different platform but the Canterwood is a tough one, especially with an AMI BIOS.

Time to wrap this one up. Personally, the big surprise for me were the TwinMOS modules, particularly since they exceeded their specs in terms of latencies and frequencies and even beat the XMS3202 in more than one discipline. Granted, there is a chance that those were selected review modules, we don't know and so we cannot comment on that any further. What we do know is that any of the other units tested were random samples, which does not mean they are representative of the entire line but we hope they are. Bottom line, we had some great memories here and we want them to linger on.

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