SUMMARY: Earlier this year Corsair launched their 5400UL part which is designed to offer impressive timings (3-3-2-8) at 675MHz DDR. Not only that but they make claims that their memory can do over 800MHz DDR with relaxed timings. Read on as we take a look at Corsair’s latest performance DDR-2 memory and see how it performs at stock speeds and just how far we can overclock the sticks.
Processor(s): Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.46GHz (1066 FSB) (Supplied by Intel) Motherboard(s): Gigabyte 8N-SLI Royal (nVidia NF4 IE) (Supplied by Gigabyte) Memory: 2 x 512MB DDR2 Corsair PC5400UL (Supplied by Corsair) Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX reference (Supplied by nVidia) Hard Disk(s): Seagate 200GB 7,200RPM PATA (Supplied by Seagate) Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP1 Drivers: nVidia Forceware 77.72, nVidia nForce4 SLI Intel Edition 7.13 and DX9c
We’ve used the impressive Gigabyte 8N-SLI Royal motherboard based on nVidia’s nForce4 Intel Edition chipset which offers all the flexible memory divider settings you could ever possibly need (as discussed in the introduction). As such, it’s a dream platform for this type of testing environment.
Our Pentium 4 EE CPU remained at or very close to 1066 FSB (13 x 266 = 3460MHz) for the entirety of our testing. LDT (HyperTransport bus) was set to 4x for all testing so it was synchronous with the FSB, for optimal performance. We’ve tested the memory at a range of different settings to give you a comprehensive idea about the performance of Corsair’s 5400UL memory;
The above testing settings should give us a good indication regarding how the 5400UL memory performs at different levels – stock and overclocked, loose and tight timings and the impact of the 2T command rate setting over 1T. We used 2.3 volts VDIMM to achieve every setting except the first (default) which was ran at 1.8 volts – all other voltages were left at their default settings – Yep, that easy when you’re working with the C19 chipset! All the overclocked results were accepted as “stable” since they passed all of our benchmarks several times without any hiccups and no module heat issues were had.
These tests should also prove as a solid follow-up to our DDR-2 Memory Investigation guide which we posted earlier this year. How will the newest Pentium 4 platform take to high clock speeds with tight timings and even higher clock speeds at relaxed timings – let’s get into it and find out some answers!
