Conclusion

Conclusion
I have to say that I am satisfied with Crucials PC3200 memory, it's not brilliant for tweakers though. A few things you need to bare in mind. Crucial just shifted towards their own production of PC3200 in March. They have send out an early production test-sample (engineering sample) of the product. This means that the product might become a tad better or quicker with time that passes. It can have revision changes or even SPD changes in the near future. However, as it is right now Crucial offers a very nice bar of memory. It's just not for the hard-core overclockers and tweakers.

This product is mainstream, people that do not want to fool around to much with aggressive BIOS settings and don't care about ramsinks etc. Buy a PC, insert the memory and run it at defaults that's where this bar comes in, normal usage.

What can we furthermore say about Crucials PC3200. The test-system ran absolutely stable in the conditions we tested. We took the module from 266 MHz up-to 400 MHz with default (c2.5:3:3) RAM timings and we did not have one single hiccup. This resulted at a DDR frequency of 400 Mhz is of course very welcome. At DDR 400 we simply pass a 3000 MB/sec bandwidth and that my friends is truly awesome as it makes it faster then RAMBUS RIMM PC-800 modules while slowly closing in onto PC1066 for a lot less money. As you have been able to whitness Crucial's PC-3200 is in the exact same performance range as the OCZ and TwinMOS memory modules we have tested.

If you are not into sqeezing the last bit of performance out of your system and settle for simply good and thus not outstanding/enthusiast performance then you might consider this memory, personally I'd throw in a few extra bucks though as I am a true performance freak though but fact is that this memory is roughly 20-30 bucks cheaper than the competition with memory that can handle CAS2, and that's a fact.

Also, I just took a peek in our pricewatch database and right now this PC3200 256 MB CAS3 memory is selling for roughly 58 USD which let's face it is extremely affordable.

When interested you can buy the product from www.crucial.com/uk for x and www.crucial.com/eu for £44.64  / 64.61 European customers get free shipping in the UK and cheap shipping throughout the Europe. Non European can seek the best price on this product at  crucial.com where it's selling for 58 USD.

Product: DDR  PC3200Manufacturer: Crucial
MSRP: $65 compare best price here
Author: Hilbert Hagedoorn