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Product: EL DDR PC4200 Platinum Edition
Type: DDR 533 (2.5-3-3-8)
Manufacturer: OCZ TechnologyThe cheapest on-line price for this product
Today we are going to take a peek at some state of the art memory from OCZ Technology. A company that has made a "memorable" impression in the past two years for sure.
They recently released an Enhanced Latency PC4200 Dual Channel Platinum kit, which I will be reviewing today. The flavor: DDR(1). The speed: (2x266MHz) 533 MHz. Yes that indeed is PC4200 Memory. It doesn't stop quite there though, this slice of memory is being sold with rather fast timings, 2.5-3-3-8 The memory is called EL DDR PC4200 Platinum Edition. It's expensive, it's ridiculously fast, it's cool looking with the chrome heatspreaders, it's basically all that an overclocker wants. In other words, Guru3D.com material. Let's startup this review shall we?
We'll start off with the standard A-B-C of memory. When you recently bought a PC, or for that matter are buying a new system you'll notice that most PC's make use of DDR400 (PC3200) memory. It's the most common used type as memory matches your PC's CPU bus speed.
That CPU bus speed also known as "front-side bus speed" (or FSB) is the speed at which the CPU communicates with RAM memory and the motherboard chipset. Athlon XPs have a 266, 333 or 400 MHz FSB, Pentium 4s have a 400MHz, 533MHz or 800MHz and the newer 1066 MHz FSB , AMD Durons have a 200MHz FSB and socket 478 Celerons have a 400MHz FSB and so on and so on.When choosing a FSB speed for the CPU you choose, be aware that you'll need to purchase memory capable of this faster speed. For example, many people are enticed by the remarkably low priced memory, yet you need to sync your memory to your CPU's FSB. First of all, all mainboard these days use either DDR or DDR2 memory, the mainboard we used needs DDR memory. In our case we know that the CPU we have uses the 800 MHz bus so we're gonna need DDR memory rated PC3200, thus 400 MHz DDR memory that is capable handling that FSB. Just divide the CPU FSB by 2 and you are set to go.
So in our case we make use of 533 MHz DDR memory, why DDR533? Simple, we are going to overclock the system. The platform we'll use today is equipped a Northwood based Pentium 4 processor locked at 2.8 GHz. Since the processor is locked we need to increase the, and there is the magic word again, FSB. The Pentium 4 processor my friends uses a quad pumped bus as Intel calls it so nicely. A 800 MHz FSB sounds better then 4x200 MHz. When you start fooling around with that FSB you better make sure you have some really good memory as the increased FSB will have a huge impact on the memory also.
Secondly, always make sure you buy two bars so that you can have a dual-channel memory configuration, which effectively double's the memory bandwidth and the Pentium 4 loves that bandwidth for sure. Allow me to introduce the visual optics of a slice or two...
