Introduction

DDR-400 is one of the new technologies that aren't being embraced as quickly as DDR-333 was. DDR-400 still has a few hurdles to overcome, such as instabilities when running more than one DIMM, and becoming an official JEDEC standard. So far DDR-333 has just made it into this light. To date we only have a handful of chipsets than can support this new memory. The SiS 648 is the top of the line P4 chipset with VIA taking up a bit behind. SiS did a remarkable job with this chipset as we were able to get two DIMM's of Samsung memory running DDR-400 on this board without any problems. VIA's KT400 is the only commercially available Athlon chipset to use DDR-400 at time of writing this review. With nVidia releasing their nForce2 chipset supporting 128bit interface @ 400Mhz memory we are soon to see how well this works and SiS have their own Athlon chipset for DDR-400, 748 - arriving before too much longer.

A little while ago we took a look at Geil's DDR-400 memory, which was less than impressive. Since then, Geil have tuned their process for selecting certain modules down quite well and have since released a new revision memory with higher clock speeds. Geil PC3500 DDR-433 is the next step up. Let's see how well it copes during our torture tests!