|
Product: PC 133 CL2
Manufacturer: Crucial/Micron
Homepage: www.Crucial.com/uk
As you know, we like our cooler reviews. Yet, a change is as good as a rest and with street prices as low as they are, we really need a rest. The team at Crucial managed to fight off the giant hamsters long enough to send a suicide runner out with our package of RAM. The RAM arrived the next day but there was no sign of the messenger.... Being sensitive types, we waited a full 30 seconds out of respect before breaking out the RAM.
The memory comes well cushioned in a solid cardboard container, even the most aggressive postman isn't going to bother these babies. The mandatory pictures are not needed as memory mostly looks like memory. This does. We received two sticks of their PC133 with a clock timing of 2 which is the fastest rated non DDR RAM that Crucial sell.
The official word from Crucial is that their memory is not manufactured for overclocking and is designed to work best at the stated levels. The point being as ever - overclock at your own risk!
Test Rig
Abit KT7A-RAID
2*128 mb PC133 CL2
Voodoo 3 3000 PCI
Maxtor 6 Gig HD
Enermax EG 365P-VE
The PC is the same as the one used for the cooler reviews except for the psu which we upgraded to the latest version of Enermax's 365 series. This one produces 350w which will be more than enough for us at the moment. The Abit uses the Via KT-133A chipset allowing us a greater range of fsb speeds during testing.
Installation
The memory installation procedure would be the same for any make of RAM that we might insert into the motherboard so suffice it to say it went without a hitch.
Benchmarking
The first thing we need to do is get a reading with the BIOS and cpu at default settings using SiSoft Sandra 2001 Pro.
As you can see, the results are what we would expect as the last reference figures show.
Now the real fun starts. The whole point of using this PC133 is to allow us to overclock to a much higher level than before. The greater the fsb we can use the less the system is bottlenecked. We all know that it is better to run at 5*127 than 7*100 even thought he formers speed is slightly lower.
Without going into each configuration that we tried, we were able to whack the fsb upto.. are you ready? 155..... I'm not really sure what you can say to that. It is rated at 133 but was happily running at 17% over this. The system was therefore able to get to 930 mhz ( 6*155 )and run without a hitch. This is the stuff of dreams! Back to the pictures:
The score is creeping up but we want more and a few other things.
The BIOS is a treasure trove of tweaks to increase the performance of your rig and it is worth trying out different combinations with your highest speeds to see where the line between speed and reliability lies. We found that the greatest gain was as a result of enabling the 4-way interleave function. This is meant to act in the same way as Raid-0 striping and works best with multiple sticks.
A massive leap in score with that tweak. I am still not sure what these figures actually mean, or even if they make a noticeable difference in real world applications but that is not why any of you are here. The whole point about overclocking is that it is a hobby more than anything. A score increase is almost worth more than a real performance increase. Right, lets go again.
Another jump, but this time a much smaller one. The results are from enabling DRAM 4K- Page Mode in the BIOS. I was able to take the fsb upto 157 but it was rather unstable.
We have managed to beat all the reference scores with a few changes to the BIOS and some good quality RAM. It really pays dividends to optimise the BIOS as it makes a huge difference in score/performance. The 4-way interleave is by far the best optimisation to make as this was able to jump the scores up by a quarter. The RAM was run at CL2 throughout all the tests thus underlining the ability of this particular RAM, although reducing it to CL3 would have definitely stabilised the system at the highest fsb.
Conclusion
With the cost of RAM on the turn, there really is no time like the present to upgrade either your PC100 or generic PC133 memory. I was anticipating the Crucial memory's being able to reach the 140 mark but I would never have dreamt that we could operate at 156 mhz rock solidly. There are a number of companies who offer PC150 - PC170 RAM aimed at the overclocking market which they sell at a premium. My advice to those of you who are not the hard core of overclockers is to buy Crucial memory and use the extra money on other components. The systems stability seems to be compromised at extremely high fsb speeds thus not allowing the user to carry out all the tasks that they usually would. Therefore accept a slightly lower level and keep the systems functionality. A phenomenal performance from RAM with an economy price tag.
The final ChillBlast rating is *********
Crucial's site can be found at www.Crucial.com/uk
Once again I must relay my thanks to the angel of marketing without whom this review would not have taken place.