PCSTATS Test Methodology: On AMD socket AM2 test systems, we're only interested in seeing how high we can go with the DDR-2 memory running 1:1, as running with other dividers puts the overclocking bottleneck elsewhere and not with the system memory. The DDR2 RAM latency must run at its lowest possible setting, as quick access is more important to the CPU design. Just for arguments sake, we will also be conducting overclocking tests to see how high the memory will go with lax timings (5-5-5-15), although we will only benchmark the system with the tight memory timings mentioned above. Let's get started!

Overclocking Results:

4-4-3-15 5-5-5-15 memory speed: 1096 MHz 1104 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 has been OCZ's target specialty since the beginning - heck it is OverClockerZ - and we've had quite a bit of luck with OCZ memory modules in the past. Before the overclocking session started though, the AMD Athlon64 FX-62 CPU clock multiplier was lowered to 10x. This ensures the processor will not max out before the PC2-7200 Platinum XTC does.

With the memory voltage kept at 2.1V, the memory frequency was increased in 4-6 MHz intervals from a starting point of 200 MHz. The chrome heatspreaders were quite warm to the touch, but stability maintained for quite a while... sometimes overclocking takes a lot of patience. Of course, since these modules are EPP compatible, we could have just enabled that on our nForce 590SLI motherboard - but what fun would that be?

The OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum XTC memory kit overclocked to a nice round 1000 MHz before the system started to show cracks. Increasing the voltage to 2.2V was necessary, and a few more tries later that was adjusted to 2.3V.

With 2.3V the OCZ PC2-7200 memory reached a maximum overclocked speed of 1096 MHz, with the all important low CAS latency timings of 4-4-3-15. Settings faster than this were possible, but the system randomly BSOD'd while running benchmarks. Still, I've gotta say that an overclock to 1096MHz from memory that's only 'officially' rated to run at 900 MHz is pretty sweet indeed!

Loosening up the memory timings to 5-5-5-15 allowed the OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum XTC memory to balloon up to 1104 MHz before totally fizzling out. In this case it was the motherboard that was becoming the bottleneck I suspect.

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum XTC 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 PC2-7200 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 processor: amd Athlon64 FX-62 Clock Speed: 14 x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz 10 x 274 MHz = 2.74 GHz Motherboards: Foxconn C51XEM2AA (NF 590 SLI) Videocard: MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Memory: 2x 1024MB OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum XTC SLI Ready 2x 1024MB Super Talent T800UX2GC4 2x 1024MB Patriot PDC22G8000+XBLK 2x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 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

Office Productivity	Source: Zdnet

Business Winstone 2004 runs real applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes to complete these activities to produce its performance scores.

Content Creation Winstone 2004 is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running top, Windows-based, 32-bit, content creation applications in Windows XP.

Office Productivity
Business Winstone 2004:	Points	Ranking
2x 1024MB Super Talent T800UX2GC4 (200/800)	36.2
2x 1024MB Patriot PDC22G800+XBLK (200/800)	36.3
2x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 (200/800)	36.3
2x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C3 (200/800)	36.8
2x 1024MB OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum SLI (200/800)	36.5
2x 1024MB OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum SLI (274/1096)	38.6
Content Creation 2004:	Points	Ranking
2x 1024MB Super Talent T800UX2GC4 (200/800)	46.3
2x 1024MB Patriot PDC22G800+XBLK (200/800)	46.7
2x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 (200/800)	46.2
2x 1024MB Corsair CM2X1024-6400C3 (200/800)	47.3
2x 1024MB OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum SLI (200/800)	47.2
2x 1024MB OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum SLI (274/1096)	49.8

At stock speeds the OCZ PC2-7200 Platinum SLI memory performs on par with the competition, it should after all the speed and timings are identical. Overclocking does boost performance slightly, but at 274 MHz motherboard clock speed the CPU is only running at 2.74 GHz.