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Benchmark Setup

The OCZ PC4800 Platinum Edition Elite was tested on the following hardware configuration:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 processor
• DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR motherboard
• Western Digital WD1200JD 120 GB Serial ATA hard drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 256 MB PCI-Express
• Fortron Blue Storm 500W power supply

The contenders were as follows:

• 2*512 MB OCZ PC3500 Gold Edition GX
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4000 Gold Edition VX

We used a combination of SiSoft Sandra and RightMark Memory Analyzer 3.45 to test the RAM, adding WinRAR and Doom3 to show some of the impacts of memory timings on real applications, as well as MemTest86+ 1.5 to test for errors when overclocking. For comparison, we've thrown in results from previous RAM reviews.

Benchmarks

At the stock speed of 200 MHz (400 MHz DDR) on our DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR motherboard, the OCZ PC4800 Plantinum Edition Elite was set to SPD timings of 2.5-4-4-10-2T - but we also tried a number of other settings - after all, what fun is there in running things at stock speeds?

Sandra

One of the most popular benchmarks for measuring memory performance is Sandra.

As you can see the OCZ PC4800 does quite well here; however it is interesting to see how close the PC4000 running at a 50MHz disadvantage but with tighter timings gets. Also note what a large role processor speed plays.

There is a whopping 30.5% memory bandwidth difference between running the same memory sticks when running at 8x300 2.5-4-4-8 vs. 9x200 2.5-4-4-10 (SPD timing) - an almost linear increase compared to the processor clock speed increase from 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz (33.3% improvement). With DDR400 you could not get readings that high as the maximum theoretical bandwidth would be less than 6.4GB/sec.

There is also a small but noticeable 3% improvement in memory bandwidth in going from 2-2-2-5 9x200 to 2.5-4-4-8 6x300 (which keeps the processor speed constant); the difference would be greater except for the much slower memory latencies needed at the 300MHz memory speed. The latency differences become less important when the processor speed is increased, as the faster core is better able to take advantage of the extra bandwidth offered by the faster DDR600 memory. Remember, most memory accesses are burst reads used to fill cache lines, so the extra penatlies due to latency tend to have much less impact than the greater potential bandwidth.