Fall IDF 2006 Wrap-up Coverage

Kingston Technology

Kingston Technology – Apply Paddles and Jump Start Please

We managed to catch up with Kingston Technology at an overclocking workshop at IDF and got a chance to see Louis Kaneshiro in action. Kingston Technology has been producing some great overclocking memory for a numbers of years now, but will openly admit that they could be spending more time HyperX than they have been. With Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad based processors overclocking so well it has been making enthusiasts and overclockers wanting faster memory. Louis and others at Kingston have been working in the labs on the latest systems from Intel and have produced some graphs to show off their work.

Kingston overclocked some of their PC2-6400 Low-Latency 4-4-4-12 modules and PC2-8500 5-5-5-15 modules and evaluated performance at a number of overclocking at timings. Kingston was able to take their Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor up to 3.96GHz on the Intel D975XBX ‘Bad Axe’ motherboard. They then ran the memory at 900MHz at 4-4-4-12 timings and 1080MHz with 5-5-5-15 timings at 2.2V and found that running tighter timings at a lower frequency showed better performance across the board. Once again it seems that timings plays the most critical role in memory overclocking.

It’s great to see Kingston back getting their hands dirty with their DDR2 HyperX line and we are keeping our fingers crossed that they will be introducing some new HyperX kits in the near future. In the mean time I’m left wondering why they show all 1T command rates listed on all their DDR2 kits when most Intel based boards don’t even have that setting or can even run it for that matter.