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Conclusion

They are pretty on the outside, with their "gilded", elegant heatspreader and we know who to thank for that. Underneath the polished surface lurk some ugly remarkings. Still, despite the fact that the turning Samsung original "E" PC2700 components into OCL EL ICs only requires the removal of the top layer of the encapsulant and a laser marker, it is still quite impressive how well the modules perform. That is, within the limitations posted by OCZ.

Beautiful on the outside ...

At low latencies, the modules don't stand a chance but with increasing access latencies, that is, at a minimum tRCD and tRP of 3T each, the performance was more than impressive. The fact that they still did not quite reach the specifications (466/233 MHz at 2:3:3) may partially reflect our stringent test methods, even though we are fairly confident that they rather accurately reflect the real-world stability of a given module / system. Keep in mind, though, that there is zero headroom, that is, with some luck, the modules will run at the specified frequency but beyond that, there is nothing but a brickwall unless the latencies are relaxed.

It is certainly an interesting idea to offset PAT or whatever it is called with increased memory access latencies. There are tons of benchmarks that will show benefits of one or the other configuration, low latencies versus high frequency, with streaming memory benchmarks being at the bottom of the relevance ladder. Going into these performance issues, however, by far exceeds the scope of this article. For now, the conclusion is that the PC3700 EL, using small, low density die components are far better than what the ratty appearance under the heatspreaders suggests. Keep in mind, however, that there are some serious compatibility issues as well that need to be taken into account. In other words, the warnings posted on OCZ's website are real and not just marketing and warranty parachutes.

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