OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Platinum EB
Test Setup and Compatibility
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test system for this review, we first entered the system BIOS for the Asus P5WD2 and changed all settings to their "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults". The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. We then installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we setup a 1536MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives and ran all of the tests.
Throughout all of our standard benchmarking, we had the memory voltage set to 2.1v for the OCZ memory pairing, as this was the voltage recommended by the manufacturer. For the overclocking and lowest-latency tests, we raised the memory voltages to 2.2V.
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| Memory Modules Tested: OCZ Technolgies PC2-6400 EB Platinum Edition Corsair XMS2 TWINX1024A-5400UL Kingston HyperX KHX6000D2K2/1G Common Hardware: Asus P5WD2 Premium (Intel i955X) Intel Pentium 4 550J Processor @ 3.4GHz nVidia GeForce 7800GT On-board audio & LAN Seagate Barracuda 7,200rpm SATA Hard Drive Software / System Drivers: |
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Before we got down to testing, we first checked to see how compatible our the OCZ sticks were with a few of the recent motherboards we had in the labs. We installed the memory into two different setups, using the Asus P5WD2 (i955X) and Abit AW8-MAX (i955X) with all BIOS detection methods left at 'By SPD'. The first set of RAM we received were not accepted by the Asus P5WD2 when using 'SPD' timings, and the board would not boot unless we specifically set the timings and memory dividers. OCZ assured us that this was an isolated problem, and the next set we received did not have any problems at all in either setup.
To assure ourselves that we now had a working set, we then began checking for errors using Memtest86. Memtest86 executes a series of read/write test patterns to check for errors. Using the Asus P5WD2, which will be the base for our benchmarks, we used a bootable CD-ROM to start the testing. The OCZ memory kit passed through two loops of this procedure without any hiccups. Satisifed with the results, we now turned to some popular benchmarks to compare the performance of the OCZ PC2-6400 with two sets we had reviewed previousy, Corsair's XMS2 TWINX1024A-5400UL 1GB kit and Kingston's HyperX KHX6000D2K2/1G.
