PQI Turbo Memory — Enthusiast Memory??

What is under the Heat Spreader?

Once I removed the heat spreaders I found one of the newest Samsung IC’s on the market for high speed memory modules — Samsung TCCD Revision F’s. The full part number was found to be K4H560838F-TCCD. For those of you who don’t know, these IC’s from Samsung are in the TSOP form factor and are rated by Samsung at 4ns. Actually, the Samsung TCCD IC’s come rated at 500MHz, but with relaxed timings of 3-4-4. Something else that was also noted as “interesting” were the PMI labels. I’m guessing that PQI is using up their old labels and that is why these PQI modules have PMI labels under the heat spreader. When we asked PQI about the PMI labels on the memory they confirmed our guess and told us that they were using up the old PMI labels and waiting on the PQI labels to be made. No matter what labels (PQI or PMI) are on your modules your warranty will still be intact, so no worries there.

We took the heat spreaders off our Corsair XMS 3200 XL (bottom module) so we could compare the PCB to the PQI 3200 Turbo module. As you can tell both modules use Samsung TCCD IC’s, but both use completely different PCB designs. Hopefully we will be able to see some performance differences during testing.

Decoding The IC:

For those of you that want to know the inside scoop on everything we broke down what the codes on the IC mean below. If you would like to do this on one of your personal modules or to double check us you can find the most current decoder right here on the Samsung site. (Note the final D is not on the .pdf, but we have an internal Samsung document that shows it and the following information is correct)

Key Features:

• Memory amount: 2 x 512MB
• Access time: 4.0ns Samsung TCCD Rev “F” IC’s
• 400MHz (PC-3200) Unbuffered DDR Modules
• CAS latency: 2 clock cycles
• RAS precharge: 2 cycles
• RAS active to precharge: 5 cycles
• Command rate: 1T (1 cycle)
• Black heat spreader for thermal diffusion
• Latency: 2-2-2-5-1T
• 2.6V
• Lifetime Warranty

Now that we know what the memory is rated for by PQI Memory and what exact IC’s are being used on the memory kit we can look at our testing to see how it really performs.