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The ever-plummeting prices of PC memory never cease to amaze me. I remember back in 1993 or so when I was running a small PC support business, a standard when pricing up PC quotes was AUD $1000 for 8x 1MB 30-pin SIMMS. I remember the excitement and genuine amazement when RAM dropped below the $100/MB mark. A few years later towards the end of the 72-pin EDO era, it dropped below $10/MB. Nowadays people will laugh at you if your video card only has 8mb it in, never mind your PC - and if you're paying more than $1/MB you're buying premium RAM like ECC or registered server memory.

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This all brings us to the current 256MB stick of PQI PC133 that New Millennium Networking sent over for review. By their own admission it's not going to set any overclocker's pants on fire, but 256MB of PC133 for a lousy $55 is nothing to sniff at. This squeezes in even cheaper than the previous king of cheap RAM, KingMax - we reviewed some of their products here and here a while ago.

The problem with shopping for the cheapest PC parts is that sometimes you get parts that are, well, cheap. Cheap as in "and nasty". This is particularly true in Asia and Australia because geographically speaking we're just down the road from where a lot of the cheaper stuff is made. Is this true of the PQI stick? Let's take a closer look:

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The first thing to notice is the chip model numbers ending in "75" which generally indicates 7.5ns rating - or a maximum speed of 133MHz. Although no CAS rating is specified, given that these are budget sticks we'd have to assume they're PC133 CAS3 rated. For more info on what CAS means to overclockers, read my earlier Corsair PC133 review here. Another interesting thing is that both the printed circuit board the chips rest on and the chips themselves are marked PQI, as opposed to some other sticks where the PCB is made by the "named" manufacturer, but they use chips from other people. PQI, or Power Quotient International, are a Taiwanese company making a range of memory products from flash cards right through to PC-166 SDRAM. The fact that they even have a website sets them apart from some of the more generic manufacturers. But anyway, as always, the proof is in the testing..

Performance and Compatability
We know from countless previous reviews that 2 different sticks of RAM tested at the same settings in the same motherboard will benchmark the same, so comparative numbers don't mean much. Our two main concerns are overclocking and compatability. For overclocking, we considered the RAM stable at a given speed if it would boot windows, run Sandra CPU, Memory and Multimedia benchmarks, run a Q3 timedemo then cleanly shut down. I'll spare you a big colourful graph and simply note that, in the CUV4X-D testbed used to take the Kingmax PC166 stuff we reviewed a few weeks ago here to its maximum of 166MHz, the PQI RAM was able to sustain 133MHz @ CAS2 - it would POST right up to 153MHz @ CAS2 but wouldn't complete the stability test listed earlier at any higher than 133MHz. The RAM was also stable right up to 160MHz @ CAS3, but not 162MHz. That's an Apollo Pro 133A-based board and for further compatability testing I also used it on a KT133 board (Asus A7V - my main workstation) and an i440BX board (Gigabyte GA-6BXDS) with no issues. The PQI happily shared a system with (at different times) Hyundai, KingMax and a 512mb PQI stick.

Overall, we can't really fault it. CAS2 performance is adequate for the price (256MB for AUD $55!) and there were no instability or incompatability problems. Cheap, but certainly not nasty.

Thanks again to New Millennium Networking for providing the review unit.

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