OCZ 4GB DDR2 PC2-6400 VP Platinum Dual Channel

Name: OCZ 4GB DDR2 PC2-6400 VP Platinum Dual Channel - Page 2
Brand: OCZ

by Jeff Bouton — Monday, July 30, 2007, 01:00 PM EDT

HH Test Bed and SANDRA XI Testing

Page 2: HH Test Bed and SANDRA XI Testing

How we configured our test systems : When configuring our test system for this review, the first thing we did was enter the system BIOS and set the motherboard to its default configuration. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional 64-Bit (SP2) was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed all of the necessary drivers for our components. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive and ran our tests.

For comparison purposes, we used an OCZ PC2-8800 Gold series kit that was rated at 5-6-6-15. However, since our system peaks at 800MHz, we were able to match the timings with the 4GB Platinum series 5-4-4-15, making for the best comparison. For good measure, we threw in 1GB of PQI PC2-4200 DDR2 with timings of 3-3-3-8 more so as a reference point than a comparison. Some may question our use of 64-Bit Windows XP Pro rather than a version of Vista. In short, we opted for the most stable platform for testing, which is still Windows XP.

Test System Details

Specifications and Revisions

Test System

AMD Athlon 64 5000+ @ 2.6GHz
Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 nForce 590 Motherboard
Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM Serial ATA Hard Disk
Microsoft Windows XP Professional (64-bit) SP-2

Test Candidates
OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Vista Performance Platinum 4GB Dual Channel

4GB (2x2GB) @ 800MHz / 5-4-4-12

OCZ DDR2 PC2-8800 Gold XTC Edition

2GB (2x1GB ) Rated @ 1100MHz / 5-6-6-15

Tested @ 800MHz / 5-4-4-12

PQI24200 PC-4200 Turbo Series 1GB

(2x512MB) @ 533MHz / 3-3-3-8

SiSoft Sandra XI Synthetic Tests

Higher levels are better for bandwidth, lower for latency.

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran SANDRA's Memory Bandwidth and Latency tests to assess each memory kit's performance characteristics.

In overall bandwidth, the two OCZ DDR2 Gold and Platinum Edition kits performed similarly, with the Platinum 4GB kit holding a lead of roughly 200MB/s across both Floating Point and Integer tests. In latency testing, the two OCZ kits were tied at 95ns while the older PQI 1GB Turbo series lagged significantly even though its timings were much more aggressive than each OCZ kit.