DDR2 SDRAM for Enthusiasts: Performance Tests

The goal of this test session was to determine the performance of the memory modules from different manufacturers. We selected the default memory timings (by SPD) and measured the performance of LGA775 systems at 533MHz and 557MHz memory frequencies. These frequencies were arrived at by using the standard 3:4 memory divisor at 200MHz and 250MHz FSB clock rate. That is, we checked out DDR2-533 in the regular mode of the CPU, while DDR2-667 memory was tested when the FSB was overclocked to 250MHz.

To test the memory modules in the regular mode at 533MHz memory frequency, we used the “reference?i925XE Express-based mainboard called Intel Desktop Board D925XECV2. To test the memory in the overclocking DDR2-667 mode at 250MHz FSB, we took an ASUS P5AD2-E Premium mainboard which was too based on the i925XE mainboard and offered wide CPU overclocking opportunities.

So, we assembled our test platforms from the following hardware:

• Processors:
  • Intel Pentium 4 550J (LGA775, 3.4GHz);
  • Intel Pentium 4 520J (LGA775, 2.8GHz).
• Mainboards:
  • Intel Desktop Board D925XECV2 (LGA775, i925XE);
  • ASUS P5AD2-E Premium (LGA775, i925XE).
• Sapphire RADEON X800 XT (PCI-E x16) graphics card.
• Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150) hard disk drive.

DDR2-533 Test Mode

First, here are the results of synthetic tests:

As might have been expected, the OCZ PC2 4200 Enhanced Bandwidth Platinum memory with the most aggressive timings has the highest performance according to our synthetic tests.