GeIL PC3500 DDR RAM Review - GeIL PC3500 DDR RAM Review
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Product: GeIL PC3500 512MB DDR-RAM
Price: $194, $94 for 256 MB
Availability: Now
Written by: Chad (Memphist0)
Reviewed: August, 2002
Edited by: Mack (SPeeD)
Benchmarks cont.
It definitely looks like 3DMark enjoys the added bandwidth. By being able to use the 3:4 ratio and enjoying the additional bandwidth the score saw roughly a 3% increase, or about 300+ points. And to anyone that is familiar with this benchmark that's a fairly big jump for using the same processor and video card.
Not nearly the increase in scores here that we saw in 3DMark, but that makes sense. Code Creatures' performance usually seems to be tied more to the Video Card's ability than the systems. Even with the processor's increased speed it only increased less than 3%.
This benchmark really shows off some of the benefits of the extra memory bandwidth. At the slower processor speed we see nearly 16% increase due to the memory bandwidth alone. And, at the higher processor speeds we see around 8% increase.
Now for a real game. I purposely choose Quake 3 Arena, despite its age, because it tends to reflect system changes more than other games. The benchmark for this was using the default High Quality settings, running Demo001.
Here you can see a 15 frames per second and 14 frames per second increase, which can be directly attributed to the additional memory bandwidth. Again, not to shabby of a performance increase simply by choosing RAM that can be run at high speeds.
Benchmarks cont.
Last page of benchmarks I promise ;)
I only ran PCMark 2002 on the 2.77 GHz overclocked processor. I figured by this point you could see how the performance scales between the different processor speeds.
As expected the CPU and HDD scores show normal variance between different runs, but look at those Memory score! A 760 point increase thanks to the speed of the GeIL PC3500.
OK, we are going to finish off the benchmarks here with some screenies from MemTach. I figure the screenies would be better than trying to graph it due to the sheer volume of statistics MemTach provides.
On the top we have the 163 megahertz memory bus and on the bottom is 217 megahertz memory bus.
Just comparing the first few sets of scores in the Average Megabyte per second column shows a consistent performance increase between 19% and 21%. Not to freakin' bad.
Alright, time to head on to the last page for the highly anticipated conclusion.
Highs
Excellent performance, matches RDRAM 1066 benchmark numbers
In one word, STABLE
Lifetime Warranty
Very solid build, the heat spreaders are not the cheesy thin ones
Available in 512MB modules
Lows
Needs a lot of voltage, make sure your motherboard can handle it
Problems with the Epox 8K3A/+ motherboard
Rating
9 out of 10, with marks only taken off for some issues with the Epox 8K3A+
Conclusion
The GeIL memory has earned the prestigious OCA Essential Hardware Award.
I honestly thought before receiving the memory that it would not meet the performance claims. But it did. In fact, it is currently running in my system at 440 megahertz, after burn-in, with NO stability problems! Initially, it was only stable right at the 433 megahertz its rated at. I do believe the memory could go higher but unfortunately my Intel processor will not let me push it any further, where's the SiS648 when you need it.
Thanks to GeIL USA for providing the sample for the review.
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