The Modules

First off we see the two modules side by side. The Geil one looks much more pleasing with the heatspreader to reduce the heat generated by the chips. Samsung memory looks very bare with just the pain old chips showing, but in a very short few moments you will see why Geil uses these heatspreaders.

Tagging

Here we see the two modules tagged with their respective labels and specification ratings. Geil uses a 2.5CL with a 3-3-6 2T system rating. Samsung gives a CL rating of 3 but a 2-2-5 1T system rating. While running at a much lower CAS latency, the extra power by the RAS to CAS delay and the Precharge delay should make up for this in theory, we will have to see how well it works in practice.

The Chips

This is where things differ from the norm. We decided to rip the ram spreaders off the Geil memory (after doing the tests as to find out if it worked before we tried to destroy it). To our horror we found out that the Geil memory uses GL2000 7ns memory modules. That's right; these babies are only rated to 133Mhz (266DDR). These are WELL overclocked chips, no wonder it needs heatspreaders. After finding this out, I decided to test the memory without the heatspreaders - Oddly enough, the results were totally unstable.

Samsung, however, have done things the right way. DDR-400 modules should have a rating of 5ns or less, the CL3 rated Samsung uses 4ns modules. These chips are the same as the ones that are being slapped onto 128MB GF4 TI4200 video cards, so we are well aware of how well these modules can go when cooled properly.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let us do some testings and see what we get out of this lot.