IntroductionKingmax Technology was founded in 1989 and is listed among Taiwan’s Top 200 manufacturers (Commonwealth Magazine, May 2000), and is a leading manufacturer of memory modules. Aside from the Taiwan-based manufacturing facilities, Kingmax maintains nine sales offices spread over four continents. The company’s American, Chinese, Australian and Dutch workforce consists of over 390 employees.
Through stringent quality control and total commitment to R&D, Kingmax has gained ISO-9001 certification and developed business partnerships with top enterprises and organizations in the IT industry. The company’s innovative designs and commitment to excellence enable it to produce cutting-edge, high-performance products within standard-based technologies. Kingmax continues to provide the most outstanding memory modules for mobile computing, combining high quality with affordable prices. A global leader in DRAM memory products, Kingmax announced the world’s first memory module with TinyBGA packaging technology in 1997. The award winning TinyBGA package allowed the company’s PC-133 DRAM module to triple memory capacity up to 512 MB while maintaining a small form factor. Kingmax has also created 1 GB StackBGA modules for use in high-end servers and workstations. With the market now swinging the overclockers way, Kingmax have pushed their memory fabrication process towards making faster and more stable memory at insane clock speeds, enter the Kingmax PC166 Tiny BGA SDRAM module.
What is CAS?CAS stands for Column Access Select. It is the name given to the amount of CPU cycles it takes for the SDRAM to align itself with the processor to recieve and transmit information along the memory bus.. Memory either comes in CAS3 or CAS2, CAS2 being the fastest. CAS refers to the number of latency cycles that the module itself needs to synchronize correctly with the system clock. The lower the number the better. PC100 modules come in two CAS latency flavors, CAS2 and CAS3. A CAS3 latency module running at 100MHz requires one extra cycle during its input and output cycles effectively slowing its performance compared to CAS2. A CAS2 module is able to perform both at higher speeds and with more stability because of this design enhancement. All you really need to remember is CAS2 is faster than CAS3.
To adjust the CAS setting you will need to access your computer’s BIOS (Basic Input Output System) area. To do this, reboot your computer and press DEL while your computer is checking the memory. You may have to search for the CAS delay option because chances are it will not be in the exact section in every motherboard’s BIOS. When you find the CAS delay setting, it will most likely default at 3. For optimal performance change this setting to 2. If your computer refuses to boot or crashes, change the CAS setting back down to 3. The reason your computer may crash is because you are forcing the memory to performance faster at CAS2. However, if your memory is rated at CAS2 you should have no worries with the CAS delay setting of 2.
