Introduction
You know it; DDR3 memory has gotten dirt cheap. Very few vendors out there actually still make money on it as it has become a cutthroat market. It continuously drives prices down and for very little money these days you can purchase silly memory kits at very attractive Prices. Mushkin for example, offers their dual-channel Ridgeback in 8GB kits at $125 (USD), and to spice that up .. it is offered as a 2000 MHz kit, with granted not the most sexy timings, but at a CAS latency of 9 versus 2000 MHz versus two 4GB high-density DDR3 modules. At 125 USD , and that's 15.6 USD per GB, you can understand that this kit might be a nice alternative to low latency 1333 and 1600 MHz kits.
Muskin even tops that off by a lifetime warranty on this product so all in all that can't be a bad deal, no Sir. Now, when we review memory DIMM modules it's often all about memory timings and the highest frequency possible, and especially the latest high-end generations memories can manage 2000+ MHz, with P67 and Z68 motherboards already supporting 2133 MHz slices of DDR3 lovin.
Truth to be told though, is that all our reviews indicate that after 1600 MHz you will need to look really hard to see a noticeable difference in performance. Hence most of our recommendations have always been this: it's better to get more memory than faster memory. But at these prices, who can argue with that?
Yeah, prices caved in completely last year, right now is a very good moment to pick up some extra or new memory as the 8GB kit dual-channel kits are dirt cheap.
The end results will be very interesting. Our test suite software will be run-of-the-mill; we'll simply take all standard PC configurations and processors and compare this memory seated on a Core i7 2600K / Z68 chipset setup and evaluate it to the baseline performance of other chipsets/processors and their respective reference baseline performance.
Will these dual-channel 4GB DIMMs actually perform, will it be stable, will it be easy configurable? Well, let's have a look, shall we?
