Crucial Value ram rocks.

the other day, i got bored, and decided to order a 128mb stick of crucial value. it's rated for 3-3-3-8 at 2.6v.
i figured, what the hell, it's either gonna be 5b G (what ballistix use) or 5b C (ocz EB). i think it's kinda obvious which ram i got in this picture:



so, i plop it in my rig, with auto settings. booted up at 3-3-3-8. i said "that's not cool!"
so i tried 3-3-2. it works
3-2-2.. getting decent
2.5-2-2.. go value ram!
with a quick attempt, it wouldn't boot at 2-2-2, but i suspect that i need to play with the dram drive strength. you'll see why in a bit.

so, left it at 2.5-2-2 with 2.8v
210mhz, passed with flying colors
220mhz..
230mhz..
240mhz..
250mhz..
i ended up topping out at 245mhz with 2.8v and 2.5-2-2-10.. not bad at all for stuff rated for 3-3-3 at 200mhz

so i bumped the voltage to 2.9v. i figure this is the top end of most boards, and can get me to the limit of my memory controller (250-255mhz with one stick)
2.9v is good for 250mhz, not a single mhz higher, or it'll intermittantly get errors in memtest
3.0v brought it up to 253mhz, and 3.1v didn't do anything past that, nor did relaxing the timings to 3-3-3, so i figured i had hit my memory controller limit.

so, time to test in windows and see how high of a screenshot i could get. cpu multi at 8x, and pumping 3.1v through the ram got me this before it bsod'ed (bsod happened at 268mhz). i suspect that with a better memory controller, i could do this speed stable




so, out of curiosity, i pop in both sticks of crucial ballistix with the value ram. knowing that my memory controller sucks, i'm not expecting it to work at 1T, but i try anyway. i could only get it to boot with the ballistix in slots one and two and the value ram in slot three, and it definitly didn't pass memtest

so, i changed it to 2T, memtested for a bit, and it looked good to go. i'm currently typing this with this:



memtest latency is 49.0ns, read bandwidth is ~3420mb/s. not too bad for 2T, but probably not worth the extra 128mb

now, the real questions are.. how lucky did i get? how do the larger sticks of value perform? seeing as it's pretty similar to my ballistix, i would imagine that it's pretty similar to the higher density ram, which is $56 for 512mb. quite a deal imo

For a minute there I thought you were saying "Corsair Value ram rocks" and I was thinking but my brain kicked in a few lines in to the post.

They use Micron for the high end stuff, and the low end stuff, I would assume the 512s of this are similarly endowed. Score one for Crucial. ^_^

well crucial is micron, so no matter what ram you get from them, it'll be micron based. all pc3200 is either 5b C or 5g G based, with the G being better (tighter timings with less voltage)
i heard somewhere that some value ram goes out with the G chips, but i wouldn't know for sure unless i order a bunch over a period of time.. hehe

(cf)Eclipse said:

well crucial is micron, so no matter what ram you get from them, it'll be micron based.

Click to expand...

Ohhhhh!

an update: got 2-2-2 to boot and work relatively well. couldn't really get anywhere, even with 3.1v. (read: 210mhz was good for one pass of memtest, no higher though)

good god!!!

what freakin mobo do you have, guess its time to ditch my craptastic K8VSEDX

dfi lanparty ut-nf3

i'll be testing the newark on my k8n neo plat next week when it gets here, so i'll see if it's truly the motherboard being awesome or the ram. the 3.1v vdimm can't hurt though