First Thoughts – Kingston HyperX PC2-9600 DDR2 Memory

Benchmarking

When it comes to benchmarking the modules the PC2-9600 kit was run at 800MHz 3-3-3-9 1T and 1200MHz 5-5-5-15 2T to show what the same kit would do at tight timings and loose timings. Having the kit run solid at 3-3-3-9 1T is an impressive feat that not too many kits on the market can pull off. It should be interesting to see if tighter timings or a higher memory frequency performs better on our BFG Tech 680i SLI motherboard paired with the water cooled Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz (9 x 400MHz) and XFX GeForce 8800 GTX running at stock clocks.

In Super Pi we see that the Kingston at 800MHz with lower timings is very slightly faster.

Here we see that Sandra reports that the Kingston memory at 1200MHz is the faster of the two settings. It doesn’t match what Super Pi told us, so let’s see what Everest says.

And now I’m really confused! Everest and Super Pi agree that the 800MHz setting is slightly faster.

Wow! That is an incredible amount of memory bandwidth on an Intel Core 2 Duo system! Let’s see how that translates into gaming performance in Doom 3.

Doom 3 confirms that the Kingston memory running at 800MHz with 3-3-3-9-1t timings has better performance, though not by much! Either way you run this kit it has killer performance, but if we had to pick 800MHz 3-3-3-9 1T would be the method of choice.