Introduction
PC2700 DDR333 Memory Comparison
If you've kept up with the hardware world recently, you'll know that the two main protagonists in the current home PC market, Intel and AMD respectively, have officially decided to support a faster Front-Side-Bus (FSB) in varying ways. Whilst Intel are sticking to their 133FSB processors until the launch of the much-vaunted 200FSB-compliant Springdale and Canterwood chipset-based motherboards hit the retail channel in the near future, they do support faster memory addressing on their latest single-channel i845PE chipset. AMD, on the other hand, have successfully moved to a 166FSB with their latest Athlon XP (Later Thoroughbred core and Barton) CPUs.
Why am I talking about 166FSB, and why is it important in the context of the review today ?. Put simply, if you can reduce the number of clock cycles the CPU has to wait when addressing the main system memory (lower multiplier, higher FSB), you increase the amount of data that can flow between the two in any given period. Having an increased FSB, given the same clock speed, yields significant advantages in bandwidth-dependant tasks such as gaming, SETI, and DiVX encoding.
Look at any high performance PC built by a well-respected vendor and you'll see either an Intel or AMD machine running with PC2700 (DDR333, 166MHz, call it what you will) memory. On the Intel front we have the i845PE, SiS64x, VIA P4X chipsets all offering official PC2700 memory support for the quad-pumped processor. With AMD, the extremely popular nForce2 natively supports that memory speed on a synchronous basis with the DDR333 XP CPUs.
Whilst the enthusiast can go even further and purchase pre-qualified modules running at up to PC3700 (233MHz, DDR466) speeds, PC2700 memory remains the choice of system integrators that build on a performance platform. After all, they do everything by the book.
All this preamble leads me on the point of discussion today. We're looking at PC2700 memory from two of the biggest names in the business, namely Crucial Technology and TwinMOS. We're looking to assess just how well these modules perform once we tighten up the timings, with a view to increasing overall performance. With PC2700 becoming widespread for a number of months now, it will also be interesting to see just how mature the process is by seeing how far they go. We'll also demonstrate the gains that are to be had from switching from PC2100, if you still run it, to PC2700, assuming your platform can take advantage of the faster speed.