DDR2-1000 shootout at the GHz memory corral revealed

BACK IN JUNE, Computex visitors to ole Taipei were privileged to see the first DDR2-1000+ DIMMs shown by few vendors over there. Since the Pentium 4/D/EE FSB usually hovers aroudn 800 MHz, with few 1066 MHz exceptions, the existence of such memories would let you get the full CPU FSB sync bandwidth out of a single memory channel, or, if using the dual channel setup, plenty of spare bandwidth to stream data to, say, quad SLI graphics cards on your motherboard.
Most of the initial 1GHz-class DDR2 modules seem to be based on Micron's D9DQT chips, so the performance achievable would be quite close between - main differentiators being PCB quality, voltage settings and heat dissipation efficiency. That's where the differences happen at the very top end, pushing the clock beyond GHz.

Here we have the first such models from Corsair and Crucial in this league - we ran both DIMM pairs on Pentium4 EE 3.73 GHz 1066 FSB CPU, overclocked to 4.2 GHz on a quickly borrowed Asus 955X-based P5WD2 board at FSB1200 using Corsair COOL water cooling system. The memory was first ran at default dual-channel 600 MHz (i.e. DDR2-533 overclocked) in sync with the CPU FSB, and then at 900 MHz (overclocked DDR2-800 setting). Lastly, we used another Pentium 4 CPU, the 3.4 GHz EE 800 MHz FSB (old Northwood version) and pushed the FSB to 1000 MHz (clock 4.25 GHz) using the same water cooling system, to test the RAM at its advertised DDR2-1000 speed.