DDR2 Roundup: Reaching for 667 and Beyond

Micron PC2-4300U

As one of the largest memory manufacturers, you will likely find Micron DDR2 memory used by OEMs and Micron chips used by many manufacturers in producing DDR2 memory. Micron is not really a memory retailer, but they do sell Micron products through their retail arm, under the Crucial brand name. That means these same DIMMs are available from Crucial for direct purchase.

The Micron PC2-4300U were included with Intel's launch kits for the 925X/915 as representative of DDR2 memory. They appear identical to the Crucial PC2-4300U included in this roundup and the performance is virtually the same.

Test DIMMs were a matched pair of double-sided 512MB DDR2 DIMMs without heat spreaders.

Are you surprised that Micron memory chips are used in the Micron DDR2 533 DIMMs?

While the Micron PC2-4300 are engineering samples, they appear to be the same as Crucial retail PC2-4300U memory. Performance is also essentially the same, confirming that these Micron DIMMs are representative of the retail chips available in the same configuration.

Test Results: Micron PC2-4300U

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.

Micron PC2-4300U (DDR2 533) - 2 x 512Mb Double-Bank
Speed	Memory Timings & Voltage	Quake3 fps	Sandra UNBuffered	Sandra Standard Buffered	Super PI 2M places (time in sec)
533DDR 800FSB	3-3-3-10 1.8V	373.3	INT 3209 FLT 3236	INT 4942 FLT 4937	106
667DDR 1000FSB	4-4-4-10 1.9V	459.0	INT 3746 FLT 3835	INT 6182 FLT 6162	86
686DDR 258FSB	4-4-4-10 1.9V	472.9	INT 3980 FLT 3990	INT 6329 FLT 6333	84

Micron PC2-4300U (DDR2 533)
Speed	RCW-ET Radar	Aida 32 Read	Aida 32 Write	Aida 32 Total
533DDR 800FSB	78.7	5479	2284	7763
667DDR 1000FSB	97.7	6629	2767	9396
686DDR 258FSB	100.6	6837	2871	9708

We have found in this roundup the same Micron chips in Micron, Crucial, Kingmax, and Corsair. These are also the memories that are topping the performance charts in almost every benchmark. While it is still very early in the development of DDR2, it certainly appears at this point in time that the best memory bandwidth is found with memory built with Micron memory chips.