Memory Upgrade

A

Alex41290

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 20, 2004
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Well, I was dissapointed with the overclocking potential of my Mushkin PC3200 Lvl1 1gb dual channel kit, so I am now selling it, and looking at a new kit. With my limited knowledge of good RAM, I am asking you guys for help. I am looking at any sticks with the Samsung TCCD chips, and preferrably the Brainpower PCB. I want to OC like mad. So, I am looking at 3 (possibly 4) different brands and sticks:

Geil Ultra PC3200 - $202
PDP PC3200 w/ XBL - $219
G.Skill PC3200/PC4400 - $240
PQI Turbo PC3200 - $240

I understand the last two are price-rapes, but the 3rd is GUARENTEED to run at PC4400, and that's reassuring to me, at least with my luck with computer parts. So, if you could tell me what would be the best bet AND WHY, please do!

Thanks,

Alex
 
My vote goes to GSkill pc4400 (various); great TCCD-on-Brainpower sticks. Not only that, I'd stay away from the other manufacturers you've listed; they aren't exactly your top performers. Least of all Geil. Or PQI, hard to say who's a more "bargain basement"..

Also, OCZ 3700EL Platinum Edition are pretty good TCCD sticks... as are Mushkin 3200 lvl2 V2, and Kingston khx3200ulk2, but IMO, GSkill takes the cake there... I've seen some very high overclocks on those sticks.
 
Well, i've seen tons of reviews and stuff about all of them and how they've OC'ed the best (Geil getting to like DDR597:eek: ). the only thing is, they are the same chip, same PCB, so what's the difference? heatspreader vs. non-heatspreader?

thanks for ur opinion!

alex
 
The pdp is the same memory as the Gskill with heatspreaders. IMO, they should both overclock the same. Gskill is just rating their memories at 2 speeds because the samsung tccd chips are capable of those speeds. More of a marketing gimick to me. I have 4 of the pdp's and any combination pair of those would hit 250mhz at cas 2.5 easy. Of course, using four of them, I can only manage cas 3, but more memory is better for what I do rather than raw memory speed. Someday, when I get the time, I'm going to try them in a 2.4C that I have that does 270mhz fsb and see how far I can go.

Are you sure your overclock isn't limited by your motherboard? I remember a friend asking for some help overclocking his computer on that same motherboard, but it wouldn't even do a few mhz overclock stable, but he had generic ram, power supply, and I believe the athlon he was using was a poor overclocker at best.
 
Rix2357 said:
The pdp is the same memory as the Gskill with heatspreaders. IMO, they should both overclock the same. Gskill is just rating their memories at 2 speeds because the samsung tccd chips are capable of those speeds. More of a marketing gimick to me. I have 4 of the pdp's and any combination pair of those would hit 250mhz at cas 2.5 easy. Of course, using four of them, I can only manage cas 3, but more memory is better for what I do rather than raw memory speed. Someday, when I get the time, I'm going to try them in a 2.4C that I have that does 270mhz fsb and see how far I can go.
Click to expand...

that's what i wanted to hear...thank you!!

any more thoughts/suggestions/proof of any being better?
 
oh yeah, and just make sure you don't get the non xblk stuff. I've noticed people have been complaining about pdp, when they really picked up the wrong stuff. The non xblk stuff might be tccd and may not be tccd from what I've seen in the forums.
 
yeah, i was looking at a thread where somebody posted a list of known TCCD and also known Brainpower PCBs, and the PDP w/ XBLK was there. Is that my best bet in your opinion? The Geil is cheapest, and i had a benchmark where they got it up to DDR597, but i can't find that now. But i did find this nice graph about how high with what timings, and so i think i'm gonna go with 1x512MB stick, because they got it MUCH HIGHER with tighter timings (think 305MHz with 2.5-3-3-10). that link is here:

http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&number=9&artpage=1025&articID=258

so, yeah, check that out...same consensus? in the meantime, i will look for that Geil review...

oopsie...my bad...the PQI reached DDR597 (from anandtech) and the Geil reached DDR561 (here). This one here, the PQI reached DDR580 (here...not anandtech :p...but check their site, they did get the PQI up to almost DDR600)
 
The Geil you listed there isn't samsung tccd. For the Geil, They need to be UltraX versions of the modules.

I think once you get the same ram chips overclocking is really luck of the draw. I haven't seen any proof that brand X overclocks better than brand Y when they use the same memory chips and PCB (a recent finding). I will attest that burning in memory does help. My PDP used to not like anything over 2.75V and wouldn't OC as far on CAS 2, but after using them for a week. I was about to improve from 215mhz to 224mhz at CAS 2. Increasing voltage didn't help any, but my computer would work with 2.85V mem voltage in the BIOS.
 
well, depending on how much i get for my old memory depends on how much i can spend on new stuff...so its pretty much a price thing. i do like how the gskill are guarenteed to run at PC4400, but i like how the PDP is $20 cheaper.
 
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