Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
CPU Intel P4 840 D P4 820 D P4 630 P4 640 P4 650 P4 660 P4 670 AMD Athlon64 3500+ 3700+ 3800+ 4000+ X2-3800+ X2-4200+ X2-4400+ X2-4600+ X2-4800+ 1-Way Opteron Opteron 144 Opteron 146 Opteron 148 Opteron 150 Opteron 152 2-Way Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Opteron 248 Opteron 250 Opteron 252 2-Way Dual Core Opteron Opteron 270 Opteron 275 nVidia GF 7800GT GF 6800GT GF 6600GT ATI R X850 XT PE R X850 XT R X800 XT PE R X800 XT R X800 XL Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ What are you shopping for?

Test Platforms

Test Methods

We used the Intel D875PBZ in barebone configuration to check the SPD of each module. There are programs like c't SPD, however, the latest version we saw had still some bugs and we are, for once, confident in Intel that their own mainboards correctly read the SPD and adjust the timings accordingly.

The need to use the Intel House-brand arose from the fact that it turned out that the ASUS P4C800 does not read the SPD at all, one thing we overlooked in our review. Instead, at least the BIOS version we were using substitutes the generic 2.5:4:4:8 latencies which is a typical feature of AMI BIOSes.

The Intel board, on the other hand, does not allow overclocking, which is, where the ASUS board came in handy. For frequency testing, we manually set the latencies to the desired values, the same goes for the DDR voltages. We then increased the bus frequency in synchronous mode until the system crashed in either Caligari TrueSpace or DRV-08, both of which are very memory intensive applications. The frequencies we show as ceiling for each module are those where the system was running 100% stable. We would have liked to use Ultra-X RST-Pro, however, the card is not recognized as bootable device by the P4C800, thus we had to rely on software and system crashes. For the record, we ended up with a number of corrupted BIOS and operating systems requiring either the use of ASUS' "Crash-Free BIOS2", which we found works flawlessly, or format c: followed by a complete install of WindowsXP.

next page:    => SPD Results =>