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Product: PC2100 CL2.5
Manufacturer: Crucial
Homepage: www.Crucial.com/uk
The hours of the night are long and lonely in the pen. We occasionally hear the screams from the other o/cing crews as the Warden does the "rounds". I know this should be enough to lull us into a deep sleep but we are feeling unsettled for some reason. The prison psychotherapist was babbling something about narcotic paranoia but he must have been talking about his last patient.
Our plight has become so bad that the local paper has run a number of articles on the "Chillblast crew shock relapse", I'm not quite sure what this refers to as I assume you need to have been cured in the first place to relapse? The headline, luckily, was enough to alert our comrades at Crucial who were able to send out another runner to avoid the many dangers associated with giant mammals. He arrived this morning but had some life threatening carpet burns. After a short rest, he deposited his precious cargo and was gone, it was as if he was never even been here....
We all came too at the same and lo and behold there was a Crucial package awaiting our bloodshot eyes. Upon opening said manna from heaven, we were delighted to see two of the finest sticks of 128 meg PC2100 DDR that the queen ant was able to produce. As usual, each stick of RAM is in an antistatic bag and these are sandwiched between two pieces of sponge. The whole setup should be able to safely see your memory from the manufacturers to pretty much anywhere on earth, assuming that it gets past the hamster cordon first.
As ever, apathy got the better of us so we couldn't be bothered to take photos of the RAM. Not really, it would be pretty dull to look at two sticks of memory that look like two sticks of memory, suffice it to say that they have a little sticker on that says Crucial. Wicked.
Test Rig
Athlon 1000 mhz AXIA
Iwill KA-266
Voodoo 3 3000 PCI
Fujitsu MPG 20 Gig
Enermax EG 365P-VE
The PC we used for this review is greatly changed from the one used for all the cpu cooler we test. The main reason is the most obvious, our usual set-up is an SDR rig. So the first change was the mobo, we opted for the first one to hand and that was a Biostar M7MIA (DOH!). This was the first error on our part. The scores that it produced were to say the least - poor. There were few tweaks for the RAM in the BIOS and the overclocking options were non existent.
430/546
This was the highest score we could get so, if at first you don't succeed... try something harder (quite literally).
Once we had settled on the Iwill and Ali chipset, I set it up but ran into trouble immediately. It was able to run at 105 mhz but 107mhz+ would cause the system to hang and it could not warm boot. I replaced the HDD with a new Fujitsu (great drives) and a fresh Windoze install, flash the BIOS and are we cooking? Well yes but I'll be finished soon and then there's the mandatory lie down to recover period....
On with the show
The RAM came in CL2.5 which was the only speed available when the runner was issued forth. Subsequently, the queen has laboured long and hard to produce some even faster CL2 DDR. As usual, we are only testing the memory to show how it would perform if you took it home and slapped it in your rig. We want scores and numbers, what they mean are anyone's guess but as the hooker said to the vicar, the bigger the better.
First stop, let's check the RAM at stock speed with no tweaks. This means 133mhz fsb @ CL2.5 with the default BIOS settings.
502/675
Immediately we are able to see how poor the Biostar performance was. The scores are a bit under those that are considered default for this chipset but you can get a wide range of returned scores for one setting if you re-test a number of times so it doesn't really matter.
We did not have a 4-way interleave option on the Iwill which there is on the Abit but there is the option to increase the DRAM performance with normal, fast, ultra and ultra 2 settings. The other main opportunity to increase score is by forcing the RAM to run at CL2. There are more DRAM settings but I was not able to see any difference in scores through changing these.
534/721
This result is the RAM at CL2 and as you can see there is an improvement over our initial findings. From this point on I will merely state what the change was and then the relevant GIF. I could be as verbose as possible but it would achieve little, I assume you can all understand this but then again, assumption is the mother of all ....
571/776
The fsb was 133mhz, the timing was CL2 and the RAM was set to fast.
601/741
The fsb was 133mhz, CL2, RAM was ultra.
There is a dearth of ultra 2 info as we were unable to obtain any results with this speed setting at any level. It is one of the few downsides to this review but like the mummy's little soldiers we are, we will trek on.
Now for the most interesting part. Let's o/c Lindsay! Rather than go through each level we reached, I'll cut a short story shorter by saying we were able to max out the mobo with room to spare. The main question that is on everyone's lips is how high does this RAM go? I would be able to give you a definitive answer if the mobo had not inhibited our endeavours. I was able to max out the fsb and the RAM did not falter once, it crucified everything I threw at it except the ultra and ultra 2 settings. CL2 was not even a question, it became the norm for this RAM so we have decided to name it Kevin for obvious reasons?!!??
570/789
Stock BIOS settings, 146mhz @ CL2.5.
575/789
Same as above chart but @ CL2.
617/843
146 mhz fsb @ CL2 with the RAM set to fast. This was the last waltz for Kevin, he had managed to make his way through the whole room of eligible speeds and now he has nothing left to test him.
Conclusion
We managed to get an overall increase of 23% and 25% through tweaks and overclocking. Not bad for two monkeys and an organ grinder. The greatest increase was as a result of the DRAM performance being set to the maximum that the fsb would allow. At the top speed, the change from normal to fast resulted in an increase of 7% for both tests. This is one of many ways to eke out a few percent here and there to maximise your pc's performance. This is what overclocking is all about isn't it?
The DDR was able to easily kick SDR ass, but this is no surprise. The best scores we achieved on our Crucial PC133 CL2 review were 566/625 and the RAM reached 157mhz fsb. That means that the DDR was able to beat these by 9% and 35%, the second figure being the real shock result. DDR was bandied around as a new technology that would lead to great leaps in performance but the cold light of day proved a 10% difference was true. This makes the 35% either a huge anomaly or else I really can't do the math (for you boys in the US). We could not verify the top end of this memory but believe it to be well in excess of our mobo limit.
The results were excellent but also unfulfilling. The RAM produced by Crucial has yet again proved itself to be a great overclocking solution at a discount price. We all hear about the claims from certain quarters about the lottery of getting memory to reach these levels and you would be better off paying the premium for "special" overclockers RAM. I have not won anything really but if the lottery is this easy to win, then later boys 'cause I'm off to Rio once I get parole. Save your cash, buy some Crucial and then spank the hell out of it on a mobo that will really give it hell. The Iwill was stable but the lack of fsb was a let down, especially considering the rest of their range.
The bottom line is our home link. The metaphorical bottom line is we are impressed once more by the Crucial/Micron union. They manage to offer a fast service with a constant in the quality department. When you pay your cash, you know what to expect and they will deliver upon their promises. The line from Crucial is that they only guarantee their memory at the levels they advertise it so do not expect any sympathy if you only reach 145mhz.
If they didn't test us every day then these would be ice crystals but you know what happens if we get a positive - back to the Hole.
The final Chillblast score is *********
The Crucial site for the UK can be found here.
A big up for the helpful chum at the ethereal offices of Crucial. Re re respect! ;-)
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