SiSoft Sandra 2004 SP1b
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 at stock 2.8GHz speeds as well as maximum OC.
Kingston HyperX DDR2 outperforms the OCZ here, by a fair margin. Once overclocked, the margin of increase is not linear between the two. The Kingston achieves a 13.59% increase in performance to OCZ's 2.33%.
PiFast
A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.3, 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.
Surprisingly, the OCZ actually outperforms the Kingston HyperX DDR2 memory in this category, at stock anyway. Maybe this shouldn't be a surprise, the timings on the OCZ memory is fairly tight, and probably the difference in this scenario. Once again, when overclocked, the results are not linear. The Kingston has a decrease of more than 13% while OCZ can not even attribute a 1% decrease.
TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding
Video encoding is a taxing chore, both on Memory and Processor, we will be encoding a 150mb AVI file to MPEG2. For the AVI to MPEG2 I used a bit rate of 5000k/Sec, as this is the midrange for a DVD, which is typically between 1000k/Sec to 10,000k/Sec. I used a frame size of 720x480 (DVD Std) and 16:9 NTSC. Note that lower scores are better.
In this test scenario the two pair of sticks are matched, 3 runs and every single time they matched. Once overclocked the difference was more CPU clock speed than anything else, there is a slight mathematical advantage to the HyperX, but not enough to warrant discussion.
PCMark 2002
Another synthetic benchmark that is freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We are only going to be looking at the Memory score, as the other results are not what I am reviewing today.
These results were interesting, and then some. The OCZ clearly outperformed the Kingston HyperX DDR2 at stock speeds, once again I am going to attribute that to the CL ratings of the OCZ. The interesting factor is the overclocking results. OCZ's score barely moved from the stock, less than 1%. Kingston however, improved at a nice 12% clip.
UT2004
Unreal Tournament 2004 is graphically intensive game, so why use it to test memory? Well, if you drop the resolution down to 640x480 and min detail, you are forcing the CPU / memory to handle the lions share, so lets see how they faired.
The OCZ memory once again outperformed the Kingston at stock speeds, barely. Once OC'd however, we once again see Kingston coming out on top.
Final Words
Brook's $0.02
Kingston HyperX PC2-5400 has opened my eyes to DDR2 memory. My initial thoughts were that the performance increase was not going to be something we would see for sometime. I also had the misconception many do about the CAS ratings and how high all of the DDR2 modules seem to be. Yes there are faster and tighter DDR modules on the market, if you are lucky enough to have a motherboard that supports both and you don't OC, you might just stick with DDR memory. If, however, you want to pump up the FSB, Kingston HyperX will fill that request, and wait for the BIOS updates to show you what it is truly made of...
Hubert's $0.02
I am currently using a couple sticks of the same ram in my main setup, and they have held up very well in our constant FSB fluctuations during various tests over the past several weeks. I have not had the same overclocking success as Brook did, but we're pretty certain it's our board holding us back, as the HyperX's overclocking ability is currently on par with Corsair with our current test boards. , the Kingston HyperX PC5400 passed the 667MHz clock speeds without errors, which is still well under what Kingston markets the ram at. For the performance (as well as potential performance if your board can handle it), the makes it one of the cheapest choices out there, and well deserving of our highest honour.
Pros:
· 675MHz memory for plenty of headroom
· 1.8V DDR2 helping to reduce power draw in todays power hungry PC's
· Great Price point for DDR2 and PC2-5400
Cons:
· If running stock, DDR is comparative at lesser cost
Summary
Kingston has delivered high performance DDR2 memory that does not dissapoint when run through its paces. Although we could not reach the true top end of the memory, I think we realize this is not a bad thing, leaving us to worry about other bottlenecks. While stock performance is basically on par with DDR memory, the overclocking results are more than promising.
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