DDR2-675 - A High Speed Update from Corsair and Kingston
Testing Setup and Compatibility
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test system for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to their "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults". The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we setup a 1536MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives and ran all of the tests.
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| Memory Modules Tested: Corsair XMS2 TWINX1024A-5400UL Kingston HyperX KHX6000D2K2/1G Common Hardware: Asus P5WD2 Premium (Intel i955X) Intel Pentium 4 550J Processor @ 3.4GHz nVidia GeForce 6800GT On-board audio & LAN Western Digital 7,200rpm SATA Hard Drive Software / System Drivers: |
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Before we got down to testing, we first checked to see how compatible our kits were with various motherboards/chipsets. We installed the Corsair TWINX1024A-5400UL and Kingston KHX6000D2K2/1G into three different setups, using the Asus P5WD2 (i955X), the Epox 5LWA+ (i925XE), and finally an Intel D915PBL (i915) motherboard with all BIOS detection methods left at 'By SPD'. The good news is that we didn't encounter any compatibility issues whatsoever.
We then began checking for errors using Memtest86, a free memory diagnostic. Memtest86 executes a series of numbered test sections to check for errors. These test sections consist of a combination of test algorithms, data pattern and cache setting. Using the Asus P5WD2, which will be the base for our benchmarks, we used a bootable CD-ROM to start the testing. Again, both memory kits passed through the lengthy procedure without any errors. Confident in the stability of these modules, we turned to some popular metrics to compare the performance of these two memory sets.
