With the maturity of a market space, comes the increasing desire to push the envelope. This is true no matter what sector of technology you focus on. Apparently, DDR2 (or PC2) memory has reached a maturity level that is allowing memory manufacturers to tweak more performance out of them.

Case in point, not long ago, a 2GB kit (2x1GB modules) of memory was lacking in performance when compared to a 1GB kit (2x512MB modules). The timings on such size of memory just could not match those of its lesser sibling. I am going to be putting a pair of newly acquired 1GB DDR2 modules through several tests.

SuperTalent is a relative unknown in the enthusiast arena, formed just over 3 years ago from MaLabs (20+ years as an unbranded memory manufacturer) with a focus on the memory/flash market. SuperTalent uses MaLabs as their main distributor and enjoys a large facility in the San Jose area, where they maintain strict quality control. Their memory modules come with the defacto standard lifetime warranty, however further information abut the modules is not readily available, something that needs to be addressed on their website and the packaging.

The modules arrive with Aluminum Heat Spreaders, peaking inside was not possible as whatever superglue they used, I was unable to pry off without crossing that “safe pull apart” barrier, so I trusted my research (oh, and the guys at SuperTalent who responded to my email) that these are in fact the new Micron 2.5ns DDR chips. DDR-II memory is identified using PC2 instead of just PC in its speed rating. The SuperTalent modules I am testing today are PC2-6400, you can take this as being equal to 800MHz (although, once again the guys at SuperTalent had claims of 889MHz on their test bed).

Unfortunately, AMD has yet to release the M2 so I am forced to test these on only an Intel based system. For comparison, I will be sampling previously tested OCZ 1GB kit (2x512MB PC2-5400) at stock speeds, yes I know its not exactly fair, but I want to see (and don't you) how far these 1GB modules have come.

Test System - Asus P5WD2-E, HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II, WD 250GB 7200RPM SATA-II, Intel 640 (P4 3.2 EM64T LGA-775), Asus A55G 550W PSU

Memory - SuperTalent (1.8V) (4-3-4-8), OCZ EB Platinum Edition (2.1V) (4-2-2-8)

When you set them next to each other (the CL values) you can see some advantages going to OCZ, we will see if this plays out through the testing phase.

Test Suite

SiSoft Sandra 2005.SR2 - 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 3.2GHz speeds as well as 4.0GHz OC'd

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.

TMPGenc Plus 2.5 - 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.

Quake 4 - Although memory plays a role in game performance this was not the crux of this test scenario. I wanted to see if a current game would benefit from the extra memory, seeing as Quake4 appears to have fixed their demo program, it had to be my game of choice for this measurement.

SiSoft Sandra 2005

The results surprised me here, even with this being a synthetic benchmark, SuperTalent performed much better then I would have anticipated a 2GB memory kit to perform and in the end, outperformed OCZ.

PiFast

While it is close, SuperTalent does slightly outperform OCZ. I know some of you are thinking, how is SuperTalent outperforming OCZ when the timings on the OCZ modules are tighter? Maybe there is a little something to this 2GB kit thing after all.