OCZ Voltage eXtreme - Testing Conclusion

The OCZ VX came out on top in nearly every test. The gains weren’t big, but considering that the memory is running the same speed and latency, any gain is an additional bonus. The 3DMark01 SE favored the VX by 3000 points. The VX also beat up the BH-5 on the Sandra bandwidth test. The overclocking speed was limited by the BH-5. BH-5 is considered the best DDR produced. It looks like there is a new king; the VX has just spanked the BH-5, and we’re not done yet!

The new King

My BH-5 is now in a corner crying, so I have some one-on-one time with my new favorite memory. As I said in the burn in section, these sticks love to be burned in. I did notice that after a night of Memtest, they were just as cranky as I was the next morning. I gave them some time shut down and some time idling, and they were back better than before. The BH-5 crapped out at 225, but the VX was just getting warmed up. I managed to get stable speeds of up to 245 MHz, sometime a little more depending upon how nicely I treat them. From what I have seen with different sticks of this memory, this seems to be about the average speed for the PC3200 sticks.

The stock speed of the VX PC4000 is 250MHz. This speed isn’t very stable; it crashes on benchmarks and games. More burn in may help it out, but it may not make it this far. Loosening the timings seems to help a little, but you aren’t going to get many extra MHz out of it. I put the timings to 2.5-3-3-7 and it seemed a little more stable at 250MHz, but higher latency really doesn’t help much.

Conclusion 

From the tests that I did, the memory did very well, even though it was running on an Intel computer. The VX has given us the highest clock speed while maintaining the 2-2-2-5 latency. This memory isn’t for everyone, though. If you don’t have a computer with a fast FSB, or the volts aren’t available for the VX, I would look around for other memory.

However, if you have the CPU power, and the volts, this is your memory. Stock is 200 MHz; this memory was easily capable of 240 MHz without breaking a sweat. The overclockability in combination with latency of this memory is unmatched. Giving the OCZ VX PC3200 the DevHardware Recommended Award was an easy choice. At a price of around $200, this memory is a great bargain for performance memory, and with this kind of performance, it simply can’t be matched.

Pros

• Great Customer Service
  
• Fairly cheap
  
• Low latency
  
• High overclockability

Cons

• Needs high volts

I would like to thank OCZ for generously allowing me to review their OCZ VX PC3200 memory. If you have any questions stop by the forums.