TwinMOS are a relatively young Taiwanese ISO9002 memory manufacturer with some very attractive offerings to the performance market. Basing their manufacturing on a solder paste printing foundation (generally accepted as the best means to employ for consistent production quality) and module testing on a Sigma III, mainboard compliance also appears to be a factor for evaluation.

Even though the sticker says PC2100, I was guaranteed it would hit 166 MHz FSB!

A little tip I was given a long time ago when I went out to buy memory was, "good ram looks good." I can honestly say that the TwinMOS 184-pin DIMM looks better then the adjacent Crucial memory. For example, the traces seem cleaner and the PCB just looks better - I know I know it's subjective.... Anyway, both sticks of memory use high quality TSOP DRAM chips.

The TwinMOS stick comes to the table packing Samsung K4H280838B-TCB0 modules, and the Crucial with Micron chips.

K4280838B-TCB0 Memory Module Specs

Double-data-rate architecture; two data transfers per clock cycle Bidirectional data strobe(DQS) Four banks operation Differential clock inputs(CK and CK) DLL aligns DQ and DQS transition with CK transition MRS cycle with address key programs - Read latency 2, 2.5 (clock) - Burst length (2, 4, 8) - Burst type (sequential & interleave) All inputs except data & DM are sampled at the positive going edge of the system clock(CK) Data I/O transactions on both edges of data strobe Edge aligned data output, center aligned data input LDM,UDM/DM for write masking only Auto & Self refresh 15.6us refresh interval(4K/64ms refresh) Maximum burst refresh cycle : 8 66pin TSOP II package

We had been told by the manufacturer that the TwinMOS was supposed to go up to 166 MHz FSB - effectively making it PC2700 DDRAM - so I was very curious to see for myself.

Being limited to a Iwill KA266 however meant we had not choice but to max-out at 146 MHz FSB (we should have some updated results shortly on a board that can handle higher speeds). Of course each of the sticks of memory was able to hit that speed during our tests. However, the TwinMOS got there with the most aggressive DRAM timings of the three. The 128 MB and 256 MB Crucial memory on the other hand could only break 146MHz with the most conservative settings.

As you'll see in the up coming benchmarks, even though both sticks of memory are PC2100, the actual performance differences between the two is quite large... and more than I personally expected.