Hi all; Speedy3d DDR shootout:
2-Way DDR Shootout
It's been almost six months now since the initial introduction of DDR SDRAM, but if not for a few embarrassing bugs along the way, DDR memory as well as DDR mainboards were not readily available until late February. Crucial was among the first to offer high quality DDR ram, but initially in only at a PC1600 rating at the price of their PC133SDRAM. Other manufacturers such as Mushkin and Corsair have been offering PC2100 DDR RAM, but it was not until very recently, and after the subsequent release of Crucial's PC2100 RAM have we seen an enormous drop in price.
DDR RAM is now in full force, and Crucial is offering sticks of 128MB PC2100 for a measly $33! This is very different from the $150 sticks of the same size and speed sold for just a few of months ago. So now that you're ready to upgrade, which brand should you buy? We put two top tier memory manufactures in an all out grudge match to answer that very question.
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The chips
Unlike Mushkin, Crucial actually makes the individual ram chips (micron) that they use in their modules. The DDR module Mushkin supplied us with used Hyundai chips that were made in Korea. Hyundai chips are also often times used in graphics boards such as those using Nvidia based processors.
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The Crucial PC2100 DDR works flawlessly on both mainboards, with no compatibility problems at all. The Mushkin PC2100 DDR had no problems with the AMD 760 based gigabyte board, however caused some major problems with our ALi MaGiK 1 Iwill board. As it seems, the board failed to boot properly when we used the Mushkin RAM. Despite trying a large number of timings, and settings this RAM failed to work correctly. Whether this was a problem solely with the Iwill board, or the ALi MaGiK 1 chipset was impossible to determine though I'd point my finger at the latter. After chatting with tech support for Mushkin they confirmed that the RAM should have worked on that board as it was advertised on their website as such.
Despite not working while in the board alone, the Mushkin DDR Ram did mysteriously work when a stick of Crucial DDR RAM was used. This was quite possibly the weirdest computer anomaly I ever came across. Perhaps the board did not initialize the RAM correctly alone or was particularly temperamental I can only guess.
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The Verdict
Clearly, the best choice would be the Crucial DDR. Unlike the Mushkin RAM which had some major problems with the ALi based chipset. Not only that the despite Mushkin advertising their RAM as overclockable the crucial was able to overclock higher, and they don't even support overclocking the way Mushkin does. Despite all that, Crucial's RAM is also about $10 cheaper than the Mushkin.
speedy3d.com
The problem with the Mushkin DDR is probably the serial ROM. When they installed one DDR from Crucial and one from Mushkin, the system worked because it had a serial ROM from Crucial (Micron). The problem shows up when the BIOS fails to recognize the serial ROM. I would guess that ALi will have fixed this by now with a new BIOS. This is typical of the problems with early chipsets.
-- Carl
P.S. Thanks to hardocp.com for the link. |
