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24-Feb-2002 - Review by James "Agg" Rolfe Memory speeds continue to climb as new CPU's and more importantly new motherboard chipsets are released. The latest standard is PC2700 or DDR333 and is supported by chipsets for the P4 and more recently socketA platforms. Kingmax have responded by releasing their DDR333 product and today we have the 256MB stick on review.  click to enlarge Readers of our previous KingMax reviews will recognise the trademark "TinyBGA" chips that allow KingMax to produce very low-profile sticks of RAM. This technology dates right back to their PC133 product and is obviously serving them well because they continue to use it in their new products. We covered the differences and advantages of the TinyBGA packaging in our earlier PC133 & PC150 review so there's no need to go over it again. However I will note that on this latest product the PCB is still quite tall, much more so than the previous TinyBGA products. It's almost as if the PCB was designed for "normal" DRAMs, so the low-profile aspect is one advantage that KingMax have lost with this stick. It's less of an issue these days anyway, as socket CPU's no longer overhang the RAM slots the way that slot CPU's used to.   click images to enlarge This stick has 5ns-rated DRAMs which in theoretical terms gives them a 200MHz maximum clockspeed. The previous product of theirs we reviewed was the PC2100 stick based on 7ns chips and in the meantime their PC2400 based on 6ns chips was also doing the rounds. The stock speed for this stick is 166MHz (so 333MHz DDR) at CAS 2.5 as indicated on the sticker. Overclocking The way that SIS645 implements the DDR333 support is via a 3:5 FSB:RAM ratio in the BIOS. This lets you run, for example, the FSB at 100MHz and the RAM at 166MHz. So you get the advantages of faster RAM without having your PCI or AGP overclocked. This also means that an increase in FSB, as you're required to do when overclocking P4's due to their multiplier lock, increases the memory speed rapidly. We did all testing with the FSB:RAM ratio set to 3:5. I compared this PC2700 to the KingMax PC2100 we reviewed earlier here. While boosted to CAS 2, oddly enough, both sticks ran out of puff at 101MHz FSB, so a RAM speed of 168 MHz or 336MHz DDR, which isn't too shabby at all. Dropping to CAS 2.5 squeezed a single FSB MHz more from the PC2100 (RAM speed 340MHz DDR) while the PC2700 stretched its legs and sprinted up to 117MHz FSB. That's a RAM clock of 195MHz, so depending on the naming system you prefer either DDR-390 or PC3120. No matter how you say it, that's pretty quick. The P4 system would happily run 3DMark2001, Sandra 2001 benchmarks and even did Folding@Home for a couple of days continuously at that speed. Any higher and it would spontaneously reboot from time to time and 3DMark would report corrupted files. Here's some screenshots of the PC2700 maxed out at CAS2 and CAS2.5 on the Asus P4S333:   click images to enlarge   click images to enlarge Compatability Conclusions Other Recent Reviews:
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