DDR2 Roundup: Reaching for 667 and Beyond

Geil PC2-4300

Geil has been very active in introducing a full range of Enthusiast memory over the past year. This was even clearer when Kingston and Geil were the first two manufacturers to supply DDR2 memory for testing.

Test DIMMs were a matched pair of single-sided 512MB DDR2 DIMMs with lightweight aluminum heatspreaders. The Geil aluminum heatspreaders appear just as effective as others in this roundup, but they are much lighter than some other solutions. Geil also includes the temperature-sensitive label on the DIMM to report heat-sink temperature. While a good idea, the labels are all but hidden away when memory is mounted and they are, therefore, not very useful for truly monitoring memory temperature. They are nice to look at and talk about, however, and screen-based temperature monitoring will probably make its way to Enthusiast memory, eventually.

We do not know what memory chips are used by Geil in their memory, and the performance in our memory tests was unique compared to other tested memory.

Test Results: Geil PC2-4300

The full suite of benchmark tests were run at all memory speeds. This includes Quake3, Super PI, Sandra 2004 SP2 Memory Tests, Aida 32 Memory Tests, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein-Enemy Territory. We also ran UT2003, Aquamark 3, and Comanche 4 at every memory speed to verify stability of the reported memory timings. All benchmarks and additional tests had to complete without incident for the memory settings to be considered stable.

Geil PC2-4300 (DDR2 533) - 2 x 512Mb Single-Bank
Speed	Memory Timings & Voltage	Quake3 fps	Sandra UNBuffered	Sandra Standard Buffered	Super PI 2M places (time in sec)
533DDR 800FSB	4-4-4-10 1.8V	363.4	INT 2756 FLT 2828	INT 4854 FLT 4846	108
667DDR 1000FSB	5-4-5-10 2.0V	449.6	INT 3347 FLT 3422	INT 6016 FLT 6020	87
686DDR 258FSB	5-5-5-10 2.0V	458.0	INT 3280 FLT 3387	INT 6130 FLT 6128	85

Geil PC2-4300 (DDR2 533)
Speed	RCW-ET Radar	Aida 32 Read	Aida 32 Write	Aida 32 Total
533DDR 800FSB	77.5	5226	2059	7731
667DDR 1000FSB	96.6	6466	2303	8769
686DDR 258FSB	98.3	6857	2515	9102

Geil is an early DDR2, so we somewhat forgive the fact that across the board, it required slower timings than other DDR2 in this roundup. The memory bandwidth is also at the bottom of performance in almost every test. This is more likely the result of the early DDR2 chips used by Geil, and we are confident that current production is likely using updated DDR2 chips with better performance.

Despite the fact that this is single-sided memory running older chips at poorer memory timings, the Geil PC2 4300 also ran without incident at DDR2 667 and at the highest speed DDR2 686 that the Abit AA8 could achieve. While the Geil memory did require a bit more voltage to reach 667 and 686, it ran all of our tests without a problem at both 667 and 686. Things are certainly looking good for 667 speed on DDR2.