Conclusive Thoughts

For my first PC6400 review, I guess we are rather spoiled today. As I pointed out in the beginning, OCZ has about 10 different PC6400 kits out there, from which the Urban Elites are currently the highest rated kit. This memory kit performs as advertised, but not only that, the memory adds another 20-30% of performance on top of the rated speed. I did not find one single quirk in performance or stability in 2 weeks of testing, in fact the only benchmarks that gave me some trouble were during the cas 3 setting... There really isn't any negative side to this memory kit: the only thing I can come up with is the fact that OCZ has too many options at this time. Some people might get confused with the different PC6400 kits, and many of the kits do resemble each other a lot: confusing the "normal" Special Ops edition and this one could be possible for example. The availability of this memory has also been rather weak in this neighborhood the last couple of weeks, but this seems to be improving rapidly now...

Talking about availability, the best thing in my opinion has not been mentioned yet : price. We all know that memory prices have gone through the roof in 2006, and OCZ has been obliged to follow suite in their pricing to be able to secure a healthy cost margin in their production. If you look at the bright side of the medal, these price increases have made the consumer more wary and more aware of their purchase: they will shop around and compare memory products, and think twice before letting go of their hard earned cash. This increases the competition between different manufacturers, which is a good thing for all of us.

Now when it gets to comparing different products, that's where we, reviewers come in : we have to find out for you if a certain product lives up to its own specifications, meets our growing expectations, or maybe even manages to surpass these... For the Urban Elite modules I can say that they are surpassing my expectations from a PC6400 kit, in price as well as performance. Right now this kit can be had for about €280 at the German partnershop of OCZ, and that is including VAT taxes. In the states you can find them for around $315, for the time being even as low as $285 after a mail-in rebate at Newegg. Please make sure you get these modules, as the price difference between these and the lower rated PC6400 parts is almost negligible. As you basically get a PC8000 part for the price of a PC6400 kit, you will be hard pressed to find better memory "bang" for buck than this deal...

Let's have a look at them one last time:



To conclude, here's my take at the OCZ PC6400 Special Ops Edition "Urban Elite" :

Great headroom for overclocking
Honeycomb design serves cooling very well
Looking good inside your windowed case
Excellent performance for the price
Lifetime warranty with EVP protection
Camouflage look may not be everyone's taste

At this point a well deserved thank you goes out to Tobias from OCZ Technology, for providing us with this excellent kit and keeping patient with me at all times.

I hope you liked this review of our first PC6400 memory part, please stay tuned for more choices in PC6400 and other memory speeds in the coming weeks and months, which we'll be adding to our comparison tables on a regular bases. Thank you for reading, and see you soon.