PC133 SDRAM Roundup - April 2000

The Test

There are a number of ways one can test for memory stability, including using low level memory testing software as well as hardware.  Considering that the majority of AnandTech’s readers are interested in the real world stability of these modules we decided to take a real world testing approach to this roundup.

We constructed an application test suite split into four categories: Content Creation (Multitasking), Content Creation (Data Intensive), Gaming, and High End 3D.  We selected one benchmark for each category and ran a loop of 10 complete tests and recorded the number of failures during that testing process.  If a setup completed 95% or more of the test runs without crashing then it was issued a Passed rating, otherwise it was given a Failed rating.  The reasoning behind this is that it isn’t ok for your system to crash more than 5% of the time under extreme situations.  It isn’t ok for your system to crash 5% of the time either but we are taking into account factors such as software related crashes, and other non-memory related errors.

For the Content Creation (Multitasking) tests we used Content Creation Winstone 2000, for Content Creation (Data Intensive) we used SYSMark 2000, for Gaming we used Quake III Arena, and for High End 3D we used SPECviewperf with each one of the benchmarks looped through an entire test run ten consecutive times.

We used an unlocked engineeing sample Pentium III so that we could keep the final clock speed of the setup, even when using an overclocked FSB frequency, below the rated frequency of the CPU thus eliminating the CPU as a potential cause of any crashes. All tests were run under Windows NT 4.0 because of its superior stability in comparison to Windows 98SE.

We chose the ASUS P3V4X as our 133A motherboard platform because of its numerous overclocked FSB settings which we could use to better test the modules. We tested at the following FSB/memory frequencies: 133MHz, 140MHz, 144MHz, 146MHz and 148MHz. No module made it above 148MHz on our test bed.