For memory manufacturers to innovate, and grab our hot little wads of cash, they have to embrace the enthusiast community. For without overclocking, all DDR would be essentially alike. Toss overclocking into the mix and things like CAS latencies, and DDR speeds start to take on a very important role. As with many devices used in computers, there is a tendency to crank up the numbers to make the product seem better.... DDR vs. DDR-2, 4X AGP vs. 8X AGP, 533MHZ FSB vs. 800MHZ FSB... and well, you get the idea right? Thankfully, memory manufacturers have come to their senses, and are focusing more on lower CAS latencies, than simply higher DDR speeds.

If you're a long time PCstats reader, you'll know that we have long said that it's counter productive to have high speed memory with high latency speeds. PCstats proved this little tech-tidbit with a dedicated article on the topic, and from the response we've gotten from readers, many of you now see the light as well.

Now that the focus of enthusiasts and overclockers has shifted squarely onto maintaining low latency, raw clock speed just isn't as important as it seemed when DDR memory first came out. After all, consider that games and benchmarks don't necessarily need a ton of bandwidth, yet they do require quick access times.

In the following pages, PCstats will be testing out a pair of Mushkin's Enhanced Special PC3200 2-2-2 DIMM's. Each stick is 512MB in size, and when run in dual channel mode that equals a nice whopping 1024MB of system memory. As this Mushkin memory is capable of running with a CAS latency of 2-2-2-5 at 200 MHz (at 2.5V), it means that it will work super-well on both AthlonXP/Athlon64 and Intel Pentium 4 based systems. As you can imagine, it can be costly for a memory manufacturer to ignore the large number of existing AMD users by simply releasing bland, old, high speed, high latency memory.

Looking behind the heatspreader and all is revealed