AMD Socket 939 Memory Testing

Everest 1.1

Everest 1.1 is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program for Win32 platforms. It extracts details of all components of the PC. It also tests the actual read and write speeds of your memory giving a fairly accurate look of true memory performance.

Results: As you can tell all of the modules we tested performed virtually identically when tested under Everest 1.1.

Epic Games; Unreal Tournament 2003:

Using the full installation of Unreal Tournament 2003 along with the newest patch gives us a very nice real world benchmark! A resolution of 1024×768 was tested in Direct3D on the built-in benchmark was also used to see if any differences could be observed.

Results: Even though all these modules were running CL2 having tight timings across the board seemed to provide the best performance for UT2003.

Observations & Conclusions:

It is 100% clear that after testing 3 brands of memory and 3 different types of IC’s that all of them perform roughly the same. Much of this is thanks to the dual channel memory controller that is now integrated into the core of the AMD 939-pin processors. When it comes down to getting the best performance out of your system via your memory it was shown that tight timings proved to be the way to go. This was clearly shown in UT2003 as having a RAS to CAS delay of 2 (instead of 3) resulted in a two frame per second increase in game play.

While all the modules tested out similar one of the four modules proved to be a sour apple on our VIA K8T800-Pro chipset powered mother board. This module was the Corsair XMS PC-3200 LL module. We found that on the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset that Corsair LL module could not run with more than 2.6Volts. If we tried to run at 2.7 or 2.8 Volts the system would give the BSOD on each system start no matter what timing was selected. The Corsiar LL modules that we have on hand were using Winbond CH-5 IC’s, which also happens to be the same IC’s that Kingston’s HyperX PC-3200 uses without any problems. We contacted Corsair and informed them of the issue that we observed and they are looking into it, but also noted that their XL series was soon to phase out the LL series.

The overall top performers were the Corsair XMS PC-3200 XL and OCZ PC-3200 Platinum Limited Edition (BH-6 IC’s no longer available) memory modules. These memory modules were able to run at 2-2-2 latencies and were the top performers for gaming performance. The Corsair XMS PC-3200 XL is the only memory available right now from the "Big 3" American memory companies that comes rated with 2-2-2 timings and so far has run them successfully on every platform we have in house.

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