G.Skill DDR Memory Roundup: 7 Extreme Kits Tested!

Memory by MarkElmer @ 2005-08-04

Welcome to our little endeavor to try and sort through the massive DDR1 line-up of the new upcoming enthusiast memory company, G.Skill. We will take a closer look at 7 Dual Channel kits from the Extreme Series and test their overclockability.

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Test System and Methodology

Test System and Methodology

In 2 days of hard testing, we were able to go through 5 timings per kit, 55 times we had to find the maximum overclock, and because of this we couldn’t do too many benchmark runs.

That’s why we’ve chosen to do the following tests to verify a stable maximum overclock:

  • Memtest 86+ 1.60 10 passes test 5
  • SuperPi 2M
  • Sandra 2005 memory bandwidth
  • Pifast calculation

  • About Memtest: why did we only use test 5?

    Some people believe that test 8 is much more intense for the memory instead of test 5. We, on the other hand, think that test 5 is faster and shows errors earlier. If the memory passes 10 rounds of test #5, we looked at test #8. This test has never showed errors even when test #5 had shown a dozen. Also the other tests haven’t shown any errors when we had a stable overclock.

  • A 100% clear Memtest session doesn’t mean the memory is running error free.

    We used Superpi and Pifast for testing in windows. Superpi seems to be very accurate. In most cases we had to lower the HTT with 1 or 2 MHz , or/and increase the voltage to get a Superpi AND Memtest stable system.

    With the resulting system configuration we were able to run prime95 for 2 hours (till we stopped), so we can conclude that the results are very near the maximum of each kit.


    System and bios settings:

    We used two test systems, which are almost identical. With 2 systems, we were able to do more in less time. We also ran the same kit in the 2 systems to see if there were any differences in overclockability; it turns out the results were pretty much identical, which is a good thing!

    Madshrimps (c)


    - LianLi PC-70
    - Watercooling CPU, Chipset and Video card
    - AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Both have Winchester core, same batch and same OC results)
    - DFI NF4 SLI-DR motherboard
    - Sapphire ATI Radeon X850XT
    - OCZ 520watt Modstream / Tagan 480watt
    - Samsung SP2004 200GB sata / 2x 80GB Maxtor DM9 sata
    - Zalman FB123 fan bracket with Spire 80mm (2200rpm) fan.

    Between the two systems the only differences are the hard disks, power supply and water-cooling setup

    We used one of the latest bios’ for the DFI NF4, revision 702 (-1 for PC3200ZX, -2 for PC3200GH, -3 for all TCCD modules).

    We tweaked the BIOS to allow the best possible performance with the different G.Skill sets

    Madshrimps (c) - Madshrimps (c) - Madshrimps (c)
    From Left to right setting for: PC3200ZX – PC3200GH – TCCD/TCC5 Modules


    Now let’s move on to the really interesting part of this roundup ->
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