OCZ Gold XTC DDR2 - What you get
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You rarely get more than the RAM when you buy RAM. With this RAM, however, you get OCZ's lifetime warranty. You can overclock it to record speeds and they will remain under warranty. The only requirement is that you can only allow so much voltage to the RAM before your warranty becomes void -- in this case, the magic number is 2.1 volts + 5%.
I have had to deal with OCZ in the past and they are the greatest company I have ever dealt with. They have branched out to their own support forums. There are OCZ employees constantly monitoring the site and answering any questions you have about their products.
Specifications (as per OCZ's website)
800MHz DDR2
CL 5-5-5-12 (CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS)
Available in a 512MB and 1GB module
Unbuffered
Gold Layered XTC Heatspreader*
Lifetime Warranty
2.1 Volts
240 Pin DIMM
I think we need to take a closer look at the heat spreaders on this memory. This is something we haven't seen before. Until now all the RAM we're reviewed has had a solid heatsink; now it is open with lots of holes for air circulation. This is what OCZ has to say about it:
"XTC (Xtreme Thermal Convection) heatspreaders optimize the thermal management of memory modules by promoting greater airflow by means of micro-convection throughout what is usually the dead air space inside conventional heatspreader designs. In this manner, build-up of heat is avoided and thermal dissipation of the memory components is offloaded more efficiently through the honeycomb design. At the same time, mechanical stability is maintained."
I think this is a good idea. Remembering previous RAM, I didn't feel that the heatsink did much. There was a thick pad between the heatsink and memory chips and I didn't think it was very efficient. I think this will work a lot better, and it looks pretty cool too.
As much as I love OCZ's warranty, I'm not smiling about the latency. 5-5-5-12 isn't the tightest memory in the market. I'm hoping that I will be able to tighten that up some and also have some nice overclocks with the memory. I will be benching the stock 5-5-5-12 timings at stock speed against the max stable at the stock latency; I will also tighten the timings up, see how far we can go and bench that as well.
Make sure before you get this RAM that your motherboard will support these out of the box or that you have another stick of RAM that will boot in your motherboard. The Abit IP35-E boots up with 1.8 Volts and the memory needs 2.1 volts to run properly. This creates a small problem. I was able to put one stick of RAM into slot 3; it booted up into the BIOS and I was able to bump up the voltage some. All was great after that.
Next: Testing >>
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