Two Gigabyte Dual-Channel DDR memory - PC3500

Product: CMX1024-3500LLPRO 2x1024MB with 2-3-2-6 timings
Manufacturer: Corsair
Information: Click here

Over the recent months you could have noticed a new trend my friends. Both you and I have noticed that memory manufacturers are slowly releasing 2 GB memory kits onto the the consumer market. Why, many of you ask.

There are several reasons to do that actually. The demand that the PC, it's applications and games are setting is simply getting higher. You are on Guru3D.com, so we'll focus on games.

A good example, for instance, is a game like BattleField 2 or Quake 4. If you enable high-quality options then 512 MB of memory really doesn't cut it anymore. The game will start swapping information mid-game and everything becomes jerky and pretty much unplayable. Next to that, with next years release of Windows Vista in mind 2 GB memory doesn't sound weird at all .. that OS is recommending 1 GB memory to start with, yes .. a one Gigabyte requirement.

So I figured it would be interesting to see where we are with a 2 GB memory kit in terms of gaming performance as latency always was a nasty issue for large volume memory. See, the larger your memory is getting the slower it'll become. Allow me to explain ..

Imaging this: You are a postman .. you have 10 packages to pickup/deliver in an area of 1000 houses. Now imaging this, these same 10 packages need to be delivered over an area 2000 houses. You can imagine that since that area is bigger it'll take more time to get these packages moving around. This is the biggest issue for 2 GB kits, and it's called latency.

Corsair released a 2GB (2x1GB Dual Channel) DDR1 kit recently with some really sexy memory timings to lower that latency. This memory, due to the problem mentioned above, will never be as fast as the fastest 1 GB kit lying around .. but it should be getting closer for sure. That's what we'll be testing today. A 2 GB kit from Corsair which we'll compare to some 1 GB and also 512 MB kits and yes of course .. we'll have a specific look at gaming performance.