Overclocking Results:

4-4-4-12 5-5-5-15 memory speed: 254 MHz 276 MHz If you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

Overclocking DDR2 memory on the AMD platform is slightly different than with Intel since here you want to keep timings as tight as possible. Before the overclocking session began, the CPU clock multiplier was first set to 8x, this way the processor would not hold the memory back.

Starting at 200 MHz the clock speed of the motherboard was increased in 4-6 MHz intervals. The Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4 was definitely up to the overclocking challenge and didn't run into much difficulty till we hit the 242 MHz mark. Anything higher and the Foxconn nForce 590 SLI motherboard refused to POST. Increasing the memory voltage to 2.0V stabilized things and we continued to push the motherboard further.

At 250 MHz, the system again showed some signs of instability but that was due to the high HyperTransport speed and not the memory. Lowering the HTT multiplier from 5x to 4x solved that issue. Continuing up, the memory seemed to top out at 254 MHz, anything higher and the system had difficulty booting into Windows no matter the voltage. 254 MHz with 4-4-4-12 is definitely awesome, the memory is running at over 1000 MHz with tight timings!

Loosening up the timings to 5-5-5-15, I thought it would be interesting to see how high the memory could clock with more conservative settings. The Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4 had no problems reaching the Foxconn C51XEM2AA motherboard's top speed of 276 MHz. The memory could probably go higher but we'll need another board before we find out. ;-)

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4 memory test system was configured for benchmarking, including the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this pair of DDR-2 memory is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system processor: amd athlon64 fx-62 clock speed: 14 x 200 mhz = 2.8 ghz 11 x 254 mhz = 2.78 ghz motherboards: foxconn c51xem2aa (nf 590 sli) videocard: msi NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Memory: 2x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 2x 1024MB Super Talent T800UX2GC4 2x 1024MB Patriot PDC22G8000+XBLK Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware NF4 9.34 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 Benchmarks: Business Winstone 2004 Content Creation 2004 SiSoft Sandra 2005 PCMark05 3DMark05 Doom 3 Quake 4 Battlefield 2