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The Verdict.Well now, reviewing memory is always a very difficult thing to do as every MHz you increase the FSB the CPU will rise also. The numbers that we pull obviously don't say much to most of you. This is why we did it a little different in this review as we tried to show you the actual performance difference based on the same CPU speed yet with the memory on a different multiplier.
Obviously you have noticed the difference in performance. And hey, you can't deny that these are two mighty impressive slices of memory. It's hard not to fall in love with it. OCZ Technology definitely lives up to its reputation. Our test system limited us so we could not test that memory to its full capability though, the memory can handle 533 MHz and we got stuck at 500 MHz. Surely that is close enough but still I would have loved to find this memory's limit. We are equipping this test rig with watercooling next week though. So perhaps I'll update this article in a later stage with higher and even better results. The results that we did get back from this system versus its memory are impressive though, very impressive.
Granted, this memory is rather expensive, but if you are going to overclock and need that extra head room then you are making a safe bet with OCZ's EL DDR PC 4200 Platinum Edition. We where virtually bound by the limits of our test system as we just could not push the CPU any higher. The CPU used (in overclocked status) never was able to overclock any higher then 3.4 GHz with memory locked at 386 MHz. I always figured that was the limitation of the CPU, in fact is was memory holding me down as it would not take a higher FSB. We have been able to push a 2.8 GHz towards 3.7 GHz on air cooling, that's amazing and is quite an achievement by itself. In that rather hot and hostile environment the memory performed absolutely beautiful and most of all stable. It performed as expected at 2.5-3-3-8 timings and we pushed memory bandwidth towards 5600 MB/sec. But that's where our system ran into severe limitations. It's not the memory that ran into limitations though. I checked some other reviews and have seen performance over 6500 MB/sec with this DDR 1 type memory. Since the Pentium 4 loves memory bandwidth it'll absolutely have an effect on overall performance. The same goes for gaming, you can see that titles like Doom 3 will benefit from this type of memory bandwidth greatly.
OCZ memory is made for people who would like to get the most out of their system or simply want the best in their PC, in other words the enthusiast with a high performance PC.
Well we have to sum it up: it's much faster than we were able to test and stable to boot. Backed up with a lifetime OCZ warranty. Definitely recommended.
Product: EL DDR PC4200 Platinum Edition
Type: DDR 533 (2.5-3-3-8)
Manufacturer: OCZ Technology
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