OCZ PC6400 "EB" Reaper HPCOur first contestant today comes from the rather recent Reaper series by OCZ. The Reaper series are the latest lineup from OCZ and provide a heatpipe based cooling system, in response to the dominator technology by Corsair. This is what the reaper stands for:
The Reaper HPC series uses heat pipe technology to rapidly remove heat from the main body of the memory modules and conduct the thermal load to the extended radiator fin array. The addition of the extended fin array nearly doubles the total surface area available for heat dissipation while the heat pipes warrant near isothermicity throughout the entire design. The result is a doubling in effective heat dissipation at equal delta T or, in real systems, a significantly lower operating temperature of the memory modules.
Have a look at the Reaper's package:
Two more package shotsThe Reaper HPC package is the wide package that was first introduced on the Flex series to accommodate the higher-than-average modules, and as such the package offers a nicer view of the memory than when the modules are on their side. The package is stern and good, and offers the possibility to repack the modules if necessary.
Specifications
Above you can see the sticker on the modules, which is short for the following specifications:
800MHz DDR2 (PC6400)
Latencies : 4-3-3-15-2T (CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS-CR)
Operating voltage : 2.0 Volts
Overvoltage protection (EVP) : 2.2Volts
nVidia EPP certified
240pin DIMM
Parity : Unbuffered
OCZ Lifetime Warranty
Memory size : 2x 1024Mb
The above specifications are certainly not bad for an 800Mhz module, the only lacking aspect would be the cas latency of "only" 4 cycles, whereas most micron memory would manage a latency of three. TRCD and TRP are very good, but there's a catch! OCZ only warrants the above specifications on motherboards equipped with nVidia's 680i chipset, a board we'll unfortunately not be testing today (our board broke down just recently and is currently in RMA status). And indeed, our memory would not run with the specified timings on our test platform, equipped with Intel's P35 chipset. We had to relax timings to a more modest 4-4-3 configuration, still not bad of course.
A closer look
Have a look at the unpacked modules themselves now:
As a matter of fact, this isn't our first Reaper review, not that long ago we tested the PC8500 reaper HPC on the 965 platform and on the 680i platform. The modules have not changed over time of course, and look exactly alike the PC8500 part. They still look good however, and pictures do not really do them justice. One could criticize the fact that the heatpipe cooling is not really necessary with these kinds of modules, warrantied to only 2.2 Volts and reaching peak performance around 2.0-2.1 Volts, which would not make them very hot at all. This does not mean the Reaper technology does not work however. The heatpipe cooler has proven its value, and keeps the modules very cool indeed. In the end, in this case the Reaper cooling is more about "bling" than real cooling necessity (for the Elpida ram chips), but if you're into modding a little bit, and want to show of your windowed case, these modules do not look bad at all !
Front and back in detail
Let's look at our second contestant next ...>
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