As Leeghoofd said, at 700Mhz they should be able to do 7-7-7 timings.

And indeed, whether they are better or worse than an Elpida based kit I really can't predict. I tested Crucial ram in the roundup as well, you probably can compare them with your sticks, as Crucials are also micron based (they are a subgroup of Micron). Low voltage Micron parts are D9JNL chips, and in general Micron ram is known for scaleability with added voltage. Since Intel wants us to limit memory voltage to 1.65V on core i7, I didn't really test the scaleability of D9JNL yet beyond 1.65V.

What programs would you guys recommend and used for RAM stability testing for this article?

I think Thorgal uses SP2004 Orthos, but not sure;
if you have a C2D or i7 system you could use linpack too

Don't say the linpack word, bah bah bah, it has proven over and over again that it needs a 64bit OS and there are loads of instabilities with these programs (usually shell and not core related) I can pass IBT or LinX and yet get a reboot or freeze on Hyperpi. One of the reasons we discovered B2B as it failed even a simple superpi yet passed the IBT's here ( maxmem selected )

A very good ram test for I7 : Hyperpi 32mb 8 threads. For all platforms also a good test is HCI memtest in windows.

I use the multithreaded wprime (you can see it in the screenshots) and occasionally hyperpi 0.99b for i7, as some motherboards dislike superpi 32M for unknown reasons.

all depends on what you call "stable", if everything runs fine (apps, games) and only HyperPi crashes after several hours.... no big deal;)

Hyperpi only takes 20 mins max John, but is really a good way to stress the IMC and rams. My point is you can be linpack stable, but this doesn't warrant RAM stability...

The linpacks have been hyped due to the fact that ya CPU tends to get hotter than with prime or Orthos... For them stability issues some examples : With the v2.3 Intel Burn Test there's an error in the shell as it will always fail very high ram setting (4 - 8 thread setting), no matter if you OC or not... Linx had some issues too not correctly loading the cores...seems to be corrected with 6.02 release.

Indeed stability is personal, but in this respect of a certified ram test you need to run Memtest in Dos ( test 5 and 7 ), Prime blend or large, Hyperpi32 or HCI Memtest. Believe me linpack really doesn't cut it !!

For a total stability test try Folding at home. If anything is wrong with ya rig it will produce errors or will just reboot ya rig...

or just run at stock speeds :D

I quit folding some time ago, but in the pre-i7 times folding was less taxing than prime in my book, so I started using prime. Anyway, when your rig is folding stable you can mostly sleep on both ears :)

And it's for a good cause :) no wasted cycles in silly test programs... but GPU folding is far faster these days...

Stock is for MAC users...