Corsair needs no introduction, but you're gonna get it anyways. Established in 1994, they've been manufacturing memory modules for the enthusiast for almost ten years. Known for overclockability, raw speed and stability, all these features are highly sought after by the enthusiast.
With the explosion of Dual Channel chipsets, Corsair was one of the first to release kits designed to operate in a Dual Channel environment. Such a platform can easily add quite a bit of performance over Single Channel motherboards, clock speeds of the CPU being equal. Today, we'll be looking at the Corsair TWINX1024-3700 kit, which is a couple of matched sticks of PC3700 ram.
Specifications
The Corsair TWINX1024-3700 Kit
Some pretty slick heatspreaders are used for the TWINX, which hasn't changed much from the previous Corsair products I've had the chance to play with. I don't think heatspreaders really do much to be honest, but considering how much enthusiast ram cost nowadays, manufacturers should be throwing them in.
The heatspreaders are attached to the ram via some frag tape. Thermal epoxy would be better, but it's nore expensive. At least it makes it easy to gank off if you wish to add your own 3rd party heatspreaders. For added security, there's also a wire clip to help hold the heatspreaders on.
There is a silver sticker on each module letting us know the specs of that particular stick of ram. We can see that it's a 512MB stick, rated at 466MHz, with ram timings of 3-4-4-8. As many enthusiasts know, tighter timings (say 2-2-2-6) result in better performance, but as memory speeds increase, it is extremely difficult to maintain stability with such low timings. Of course, we're not the type to settle for what other people say, so we'll be tweaking this stuff when we get into testing.
Overclocking
The first thing I wanted to try was to find out the best timings I could manage at 200FSB. Why that speed? Well, all Dual Channel motherboards today officially support that speed, so it'll be nice to see what was the best we can do. I was able to move down to as low as 2-2-3-5 at 2.9v, but the system was unstable. Eventually, I had to move up to 2-3-3-5, and our stability problems went away.
The TWINX PC3700 was an average overclocker. Forget about running at CAS2 at 233FSB, as the ram just could not do it. CAS2.5 did work though, but things were a bit shaky at 250FSB. I was able to run the ram at 250FSB at 2.5-4-3-7, but after 15 minutes at 2.8v, the system would still crash.
At 250FSB, 3-4-4-8 was the timings the system was most comfortable at. A recent BIOS update fixed the 255FSB issue for the IC7, but I couldn't get any stability I was comfortable with past 250FSB. Initially, UT2003 would complete its benchmarks, but JK2 would not at 251FSB. At first I thought it was a game issue, but the next day, UT2003 would lockup as well.
I was able to run my TWINX PC3200 ~25MHz over stock, and we've run the PC4000 kit ~22MHz over stock (which I consider an accomplishment since PC4000 alone is pretty tough), but the PC3700 kit topped off at 17MHz over stock. It's not bad, but it isn't anything eye-catching.
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2-3-3-5
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2.5-4-3-7
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3-4-4-8
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| Corsair TwinX |
200MHz (400DDR)
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233MHz (466DDR)
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250MHz (500DDR)
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Test Setup
ABIT IC7: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3700 Ram, ATI Radeon 9500 Pro, 80GB Maxtor 7200RPM, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.
Comparison ram will be the TWINX1024-4000 kit. We'll be presenting you benchmarks at 200FSB, 233FSB, and 250FSB.
NEXT
