OCZ Gold 2-2-2 - Gold for Gamers
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the legendary BH-5 memory has been out of production for many years, and people have scrabbled to buy any they could find. The BH-5 model was replaced by ch-5, which could scale to higher speeds, but at expense of latency. In the past few months, a new Winbound product called UTT may change this.
The Winbound UTT has taken the memory market by storm. Nearly all the memory sellers made some kind of memory with UTT. OCZ seems to be one of the few that can get 2-2-2-8 with 3.3v. The chips in the VX are the Winbound CH series that hasn’t been thought highly of. Now with the power of UTT, many people are getting speeds and timings comparable the legendary BH-5.
If the VX has the UTT CH memory, what could be under the heat spreaders of this memory? Well the production of BH memory has began again, so there is a nice place to start, and add UTT in there, you go a nice combination, or at least it sounds nice. You’re going to have to read on to see if it holds up to the hype.
OCZ has begun to tailor different series of RAM to different groups of people. The Gold series is tailored to gamers. The gold series is generally low latency memory at a cheap price. The gold 2-2-2 is a prime example of gaming memory, it is cheap at $160 at a various number of online retailers, and its 2-2-2-5 latency is very low. In pervious articles about memory latency, the lower the latency, the higher the FPS in games was.
OCZ says that the gold series tends not to overclock as well. The VX overclocked very well. The stock setting was 200 MHz, and I got up to 250 MHz while keeping 2-2-2-5 timings. That seems to be a nice overclock, and mine weren’t hand picked samples. They came off the store shelf. Many people are getting the same results as I am. I’m expecting similar results with the Gold 2-2-2 I have today. Now see what I was able to get.
Overclocking
As an owner of old BH-5 and the OCZ VX, I know the importance of burning memory in. To take care of this memory, I found the maximum speed at 3.0v and used Memtest86+ to test. Then I ran it overnight for a couple of nights, as well as while I was away through the day.
The only thing about this memory that makes me bitter is only warranted up to 3.0 volts. The VX proved that the UTT can handle lots of volts, and BH-5 love volts, I’ve seen people pump 4 volts into BH-5 and come out fine. Granted, 4v isn’t a good idea for everyday use. But 3.0v? Come on OCZ, how about a few more.
Ouch! This memory runs really hot. When you put 3.0v or more into this RAM, a fan is necessary to pass Memtest86+ error free. I said in the VX review that that RAM ran hot, this runs even hotter. All the cooling needed was a small fan to circulate the air around it. Without a fan don’t expect anything higher then about 230 MHz with the Gold 2-2-2.
I will show you what this RAM is capable of, even if that means pumping more then 3.0v into it. Below are some of the different results I got with different voltage:
- 200 MHz 2.6v 2-2-2-5
- 235 MHz 3.0v 2-2-2-5
- 250 MHz 3.3v 2-2-2-5
- 250 MHz 3.5v 1.5-2-2-5
- 260 MHz 3.6v 2-2-2-5
I was able to get the stock settings with .2v less then what the RAM is set to run at. With the max warranted volts I was able to hit 235 MHz, which is alright, but well below the VX at warranted voltage. After that I threw a fan on the ram and bumped up the voltage a little higher. This RAM is easily capable of 250 MHz with 3.3v, and if you dare to use more, 260 MHz with 3.6v. I stopped there, I wanted to save the RAM for testing and didn’t want to fry it so soon.
Next: Testing >>
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