Friday Morning Reviews

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For memory manufacturers to innovate, and grab our hot little wads of cash, they have to embrace the enthusiast community. For without overclocking, all DDR would be essentially alike. Toss overclocking into the mix and things like CAS latencies, and DDR speeds start to take on a very important role. As with many devices used in computers, there is a tendency to crank up the numbers to make the product seem better.... DDR vs. DDR-2, 4X AGP vs. 8X AGP, 533MHZ FSB vs. 800MHZ FSB... and well, you get the idea right? Thankfully, memory manufacturers have come to their senses, and are focusing more on lower CAS latencies, than simply higher DDR speeds. In the following pages, PCstats will be testing out a pair of Mushkin's Enhanced Special PC3200 2-2-2 DIMM's. Each stick is 512MB in size, and when run in dual channel mode that equals a nice whopping 1024MB of system memory. As this Mushkin memory is capable of running with a CAS latency of 2-2-2-5 at! 200 MHz (at 2.5V), it means that it will work super-well on both AthlonXP/Athlon64 and Intel Pentium 4 based systems.

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In our opinion, this is a required purchase if you're sitting on the 200MHz bus. Spending your money on faster ram is pointless if your setup can't handle the high clock speeds. Buying faster ram, while tweaking the timings is also pointless as well, as they still can't match what we've seen of the TWINX-3200XL Pro today.