4GB of memory, how do you use it all? Mushkin XPS2-8500 Tested

Test System Setup

Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (Supplied by Intel)

Motherboard: eVGA nForce 680i SLI

Hard Disk: Seagate 500GB 7200.9 SATA (Supplied by Seagate)

Graphics Card: MSI Radeon X1950 Pro (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: Gigabyte Neon775 (Supplied by Gigabyte)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2

Drivers: Nvidia nForce platform driver 9.53, ATI Catalyst 7.1 and DX9c

As mentioned in our earlier pages, we ran the modules at both stock and overclocked speeds, we tested the Mushkin to as far as we could in the time we were allotted to do the review, if we had more time we quite possibly would have gotten higher speeds, however we were simply constrained by time.

We did our testing under Windows XP x64 in both 2GB configurations (using 2 x1GB Corsair XMS2-8500 modules) and 4GB mode (using the 2 x 2GB Mushkin modules).

We ran a few benchmarks to see if there are any major differences between having 4GB and 2GB of memory. Let's take a closer look at performance now.

Everest Ultimate Edition

Version and / or Patch Used: 2006

Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Buy It Here

Everest Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning Everest Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.

Mushkin's 4GB memory setup has slightly higher bandwidth at stock and OC speeds due to its lower latency, so we can see that adding extra size does not reduce or increase latency, which is a good sign.

As you increase memory capacity, memory performance is sometimes reduced and Mushkin have managed to keep performance up, which is great.