SiSoft Sandra 2004 - Memory Benchmark

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.

Corsair claims a 10% improvement compared to their PC4000 XMS modules, and our Sisoft Sandra results reflect that more or less. There is an improvement of about 300 points when moving from 250MHz to 275Mhz.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

We shave about two seconds with the 25MHz jump. At 277MHz, there is still an improvement, but it's very small.

TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding

Video editing is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the TWINX using TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode a 7.78MB, 1:30 movie trailer to a 24FPS MPG file. Note that lower scores are better.

Not much of a change here, but the MPEG-1 file is probably too small to show any major results. The move from 250MHz to 275MHz still shaves a second off the encoding time.

Unreal Tournament 2003

UT2K3 s a real system killer, and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the [H]ardocp UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1, and selected the dm-inferno map, running the benchmark at 1024x768.

There is a nice bump of five frames per second when moving from 250MHz to 275MHz. The maximum stable OC was only another 2MHz, so we barely got one extra frame per second here.

Splinter Cell

We used the Beyond3D demo for Splinter Cell, and ran the demo at 1024x768 at the lowest detail levels.

As with the rest of the benchmarks today, we can see slight improvements as we move up in clock speed.

Final Words

If overclocking is your game, Corsair's TWINX1024-4400 has you covered. The ram was very stable throughout testing, and a solid 275MHz OC at 1:1 with the ASUS P4C800-E is quite a feat. We've been able to get some high quality PC4000 kits to this speed setting, but this memory kit reviewed today is the only one I honestly feel comfortable with at those speeds. It's been three weeks now, with normal daily use, and our testbed is still completely reliable.

I didn't talk about it yet, but like other high speed memory modules, the TWINX reviewed today runs quite warm. The 2.8v needed for 277MHz operation was hot, but at 275MHz, the lower 2.75v made quite a difference. In fact, the lower voltage resulted in the TWINX running cooler than past ram modules at similar clock speeds (we've often needed to bump those modules up to 2.8v-2.9v).

In case you missed it earlier, I left out 200FSB performance for a reason. If you have no intention of overclocking past 250FSB, this ram is not for you. I had some issues at 200MHz actually, where I was not able to run with timings as tight as I could with Corsair's TWINX PC3200 kit. However, this ram is not targeted at users who are satisfied with staying at PC3200. Our review kit rings in at , and frankly, you'll be wasting your money if you're not going to push the ram to its limits.

For those of you who live on the edge, the TWINX1024-4400 is your ticket there. As I've mentioned earlier, we fired up several ram modules here with R.S.T. Pro2 installed, and let's just say some of the results were quite enlightening. All our PC4000 modules passed 250MHz @ 3-4-4-8 (which is good, or somebody would have gotten an ass biting), but none passed our 275MHz tests. What does this tell us? Well, if stability and reliability are concerns, and it damn should at these speeds, the TWINX1024-4400 is the only ram we'll recommend at speeds in excess of 250MHz.

(If your hardware can do it)

Pros: Official 275MHz support, stable, excellent performance.

Cons: Expensive.

Bottom Line: Users who remain at under 250MHz (either by choice, or if their hardware doesn't support it), should pass on these modules. Extreme overclockers on the other hand should give this TWINX kit serious consideration.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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