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Technology and Photo's
Right, Patriot Memory. As you can already noticed, this product is made for a rather specific category of PC users, tweakers and overclockers. People who tweak the crap out of their system, I like to call them enthusiasts. To be able to test this product to it's fullest potential we will need to overclock the PC and of course we'll do just that. We'll check this product with aggressive BIOS ram timings and a CAS at 2 (Column Address Strobe) latency to see if it lives up to it's specification. In this test we will make use of a test system that allows overclocking and memory tweaking from within the BIOS.
Let's take a closer look at the memory modules.
We received a Dual Channel (paired) kit, 512 MB each.
The module is constructed out of a six layer PCB (Printed Circuit Board). You have to admit, the heat spreader is looking fancy. In fact it's one of the more beautiful looking modules I have seen. Personally I don't need the lights and night-rider LED stuff that some competition is making these days, it's a stick of memory for crying out loud, not a Christmas tree! Of course the heatspreader (aluminum) is on there to remove and dissipate heat as fast as possible from the memory chips, that or for the aesthetics ;) The heat spreader is firmly attached to the module. A red colored PCB and furthermore what catches the eye is that the module looks very well-built, the performance test we ran will back that up.
This module in fact supports a CAS latency of 2 at 2.5v (default, I recommend 2.6 volts though). On a 533MHz rating you definitely need to increase that juice to at least 2.8-2.9 volts. But hey CAS 2:2:2:5 for 400 MHz PC3200 memory, timings do not get faster then that people.
As stated, this is a paired (2x512MB) kit for Dual Channel configuration. The older motherboards we have in our rigs these days only offer single-channel DDR266/333/400 support which only delivers half of the memory bandwidth. The Pentium 4 is very sensitive to memory bandwidth. If your mainboard supports Dual Channel, then please go for it.
You know, the best utilization on CPU FSB versus the memory is 1:1. So a 800 MHz FSB versus 800 MHz DDR memory would be ideal. We're not quite there yet I'm afraid.
The usual booty shot ;)
