Crucial PC3200 Memory Review - In the Package
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Opening the package, I was a bit surprised to see single sided DIMMs. I haven't touched single-sided memory since my 486 days. My gigabyte of RAM from Infineon came in the form of double-sided DIMMs.
The back of the memory shows a butterfly-like pattern on the PCB:
The left sticker has Micron's logo on it. (Crucial is a division of Micron.) Peeling away at the sticker and looking at the chips on the stick of RAM show that these are Micron 46V32M8-5B chips that were made in Singapore.
The '-5B' is important, since looking at the data sheets shows that the 5B is the only model that supports transfer speeds of 200 MHz DDR, giving it an effective transfer rate of 400 MHz. They also have a cycle time of 5 ns when the CAS Latency is 3. DDR is short for Double Data Rate, and it allows data transfer between the memory and the processor twice for every clock cycle. If you ever did wind sprints or 'suicides' as we called them in gym class, DDR is similar to doing two suicides in the time it would normally take to do one. It kills the legs, but it’s really impressive. Lucky for us, doing suicides with our memory won't tire the memory out.
The data sheet showed that they support timings of 3-3-3; while not conservative, they are not terribly aggressive either. CPU-Z also confirmed this. Crucial’s data sheet did say that these chips do support CAS Latency 2 and 2.5, so there is some room to play if you want to have some fun with the memory. Unfortunately, I don't know if moving the timings from SPD (Serial Presence Detect, the equivalent to setting the timings to 'auto') will void the warranty too - I suggest contacting Crucial if this is a concern for you.
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