Introduction

Today the PC world is spinning faster and faster. New products spring up almost overnight these days, and with the new products, it pushes the older ones to the side and attempt to move away from them as quickly as they possibly can. This might be Intel's plan for its I9xx series chipsets with DDR-2, but DDR is still here for quite some time yet, just as PC100 and PC133 is still being produced by the majority of memory manufacturers. It was only recently that most memory manufacturers stopped producing EDO memory, such as Kingston who we visited last month at their factory in Shanghai, China.

I875 and I865 series chipset are fully mature, taking great advantage of this memory technology, as is AMD Athlon 64 series CPU's. With support only for DDR across a lot of platforms at this stage, you won't see DDR disappear as quickly as SDR did from the desktop.

DDR has just about reached its limits, hitting the high 500MHz mark and even beyond. Overclockers have now started to take serious looks at the DDR-500 memory for the convenience of the headroom DDR-500 gives DDR-400 chipsets for FSB and memory overclocking functions.

Today we have four Dual Channel DDR-500 kits on the test bed to see just what can be had for your overclocking dollar. Today's candidates are OCZ, Kingmax, Mushkin and TwinMOS which are all running DDR-500 and all supporting a maximum memory bandwidth transfer of 8.0GB/s on the right motherboards. Let's give them all a quick run down and work out which is the best option to choose.

Find the lowest price on Dual Channel DDR-500 Memory Kits!