The Corsair 2GB PC2-10000C5 Dominator Memory Kit Review

The Test Platform

Corsair XMS2-1000C5DF Memory Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model
Processor	Intel C2D X6800
Motherboard	eVGA 680I SLI w/ P25 BIOS
Video Card	1 x GeForce 8800GTX
Hard Drive	Western Digital 250GB
Cooling	Corsair Nautilus 500
Power Supply	PC Power & Cooling 1KW
Operating System	Windows XP Professional

Testing Procedure:

All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows XP Professional build 2600 with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c. All benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. We left the processor alone and only changed the memory divider during testing. This will look and see if running memory this fast is even worth it as the processor isn’t being touched during the review.

Many people might not agree with my testing methods on this kit, but I don’t feel that increasing the front side bus, which increased the processor frequency, will show how the additional bandwidth helps performance. The 680i SLI motherboard allows for the memory to run unlinked and this review was done with the memory unlinked. This way we could compare PC2-8500, PC2-9136 and PC2-10000 modules and the only difference would be the memory frequency. Since we did it this way we had to run the memory at 1244.4MHz as 1250MHz could not be reached if we didn’t raise the front side bus. The slight difference in frequency shouldn’t really hurt the performance as it’s not even 0.5% of the overall clock speed.

The timings:

The Corsair DOMINATOR PC2-10000C5DF modules were set to run at 5-5-5-18 2T timings for all the testing done at 2.4V.